Technologist · Translator · Teacher
Twenty years building the systems.
Now asking what they cost to run.
I write and speak about the energy behind artificial intelligence — the power, water, and grid capacity that every model, every inference, every "just add AI" roadmap quietly assumes will be there. I come to this as a career technologist, not a spectator: software engineer, fractional CTO, and technical program leader who has spent two decades in the rooms where these tradeoffs actually get made.
Orofino, Idaho — relocating to Davis, California
Start Here
The research agenda, in five pieces
I publish on a Monday/Thursday cadence. These are the first five arguments I'm building the public paper trail on — see all of it in Writing below.
Product & Business
The Hidden Line Item
Product and engineering teams make build-vs-buy and model-selection calls every week that carry a real energy cost — and almost nobody's pricing it in.
Contrarian Takes
The Efficiency Trap
Why efficiency gains alone won't shrink AI's total energy draw — an argument from Jevons Paradox, not from vibes.
Numbers & Explainers
Training vs. Inference, Actually Compared
Case Studies
Who's Actually Doing Grid-Aware Compute
Policy & Regulation
What Regulators Should Actually Do
Translating IEA and DOE data into concrete recommendations for utility regulators and city councils.
Writing
The full archive
Sorted by the question each piece is trying to answer, not by publish date. New writing goes up on a Monday/Thursday cadence — check back, or subscribe via the contact form.
Product & Business
The Hidden Line Item
Product and engineering teams make build-vs-buy and model-selection calls every week that carry a real energy cost — and almost nobody's pricing it in.
Product & Business
Model Sizing Is a Budget Decision
Why choosing between a foundation model and a fine-tuned small model is an energy decision wearing a product-strategy costume.
Infrastructure
What a Data Center Actually Drinks
Power draw, water use, and PUE — the physical reality behind "the cloud."
Infrastructure
Carbon-Aware Scheduling, Plainly Explained
Policy & Regulation
What Regulators Should Actually Do
Translating IEA and DOE projections into concrete recommendations for ratepayers and utility commissions.
Contrarian Takes
The Efficiency Trap
Jevons Paradox says efficiency gains get spent, not banked. AI's "green" efficiency narrative needs to reckon with that — this is the argument for why.
Case Studies
Who's Actually Doing Grid-Aware Compute
A journalistic profile of a company treating power constraints as a design input, not an afterthought.
Career Pivot
What Twenty Years of Building Software Taught Me About Asking Better Questions
On being the translator in the room — technologist, teacher, and now, researcher.
Numbers & Explainers
Training vs. Inference, By the Numbers
Numbers & Explainers
AI's Share of Global Electricity, State by State
"The bill for not deciding always comes due. It's just late."— from "The Hidden Line Item"
Speaking
Topics I speak on
I'm building toward mid-tier sustainability-and-technology conferences over the next year. Local meetups, podcasts, and panels welcome now.
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01
The Energy Line Item Nobody Puts on the Roadmap
A product-and-delivery framing of AI energy cost, for technical and business audiences alike.
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02
Efficiency Won't Save Us — Here's the Math
A plain-language walkthrough of Jevons Paradox, aimed at people who've been told efficiency solves this.
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03
Translating Between Engineers and Everyone Else
What twenty years of technical leadership teaches about making complexity legible without dumbing it down.
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04
What Regulators and Ratepayers Should Actually Ask
A policy-facing talk translating IEA/DOE data into concrete questions for local decision-makers.
CV · Research Statement
Two decades, one throughline
Lead Technical Project Manager
Leads delivery across a portfolio of AI, SaaS, and enterprise-modernization engagements — roughly 60 globally distributed teammates across 11 time zones, seven project managers and product owners coached directly. Highlights: internal AI capabilities supporting more than 200,000 customers with zero downtime for a global health-and-wellness client; a self-hosted Whisper model training initiative for AI-powered medical documentation; a speech-recognition, AWS, and Salesforce integration associated with a 300% increase in sales; and ongoing modernization of a multi-vendor veterinary platform (legacy .NET, Service Fabric → AKS, CI/CD).
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Owner
Acquired, stabilized, and exited a community movie theater — operations, staffing, payroll, marketing, programming, events, facilities, ticketing, pricing, and customer experience, all while keeping continuity for employees and customers through the ownership transition. Corrected longstanding operating practices and rebuilt accountability, stabilizing the business at roughly $10,000/month in profit within four months, then exited.
Fractional CTO, Full-Stack Engineer
Ongoing technical leadership partner to growing organizations — product strategy, engineering execution, AI adoption, and systems integration, hands-on and at the executive-direction level.
AI Advisor
Advising leadership on delivery, enablement, data, product, and AI-adoption change management.
Chief Technology Officer
Technology leadership for an early-stage real estate investment syndication startup — product strategy, technical planning, and platform direction as lead engineer on a small team.
Software Engineer, Project Lead
Built and launched LMS technology, a fully integrated NetSuite customer portal, and customer-facing e-commerce experiences. Contributed to software architecture, development, and technical training. When I started, my manager didn't know front-end from back-end, or what a database actually did. By the time I left, he could speak confidently to our whole stack — and I count that as some of the best work I did there.
Technology Instructor
Designed and taught curriculum in web development and application programming — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, WordPress, software architecture. Mentored students toward portfolio-ready, real-world work.
Software Engineer
Full-stack development for regional and international web properties — custom PHP, Magento, BigCommerce, and WordPress at enterprise scale.
Co-Founder
Co-built a construction company to roughly $1M in annual revenue with two crews and about fifteen employees, running the back office — finance, legal and contract administration, marketing, HR, payroll, benefits, debt, and capital planning.
Chief Marketing Officer
Built a custom SaaS platform with a three-person team, consolidating twelve fragmented systems into one — cutting licensing costs and customer-service overhead significantly over five years. Managed a team of fourteen across five departments.
Founder
Built a PR, marketing, and strategic communications firm for small-to-medium Utah businesses to roughly $500K in annual revenue — a team of three in-house plus twenty contractors, 350+ press placements landed for clients, and 50+ client websites self-taught and built along the way.
Creative Director & CTO
Creative direction, magazine design, editing, and publishing — four volumes produced during tenure, alongside team building and event planning.
Education
The Wharton School — Chief Technology Officer Program, Information Technology
University of Phoenix — B.S., Business Administration (Health Care Administration)
PhD Target
Computer Science, with a research emphasis on data and energy — targeting UC Davis, tied to a confirmed relocation to Davis, California.
Technology & Platforms
Methods & Business Capabilities
About
The short version
I've spent twenty years as the person in the room who can talk to the engineers and the executives in the same meeting — sometimes in the same sentence. I've been a software engineer, a fractional CTO for companies that needed technical leadership before they could afford to hire it full-time, an IT instructor, and, for the last several years, a lead project manager running AI-enabled delivery programs across eleven time zones at Tech9.
Alongside that, I've started, bought, run, or turned around roughly thirteen businesses — construction, PR and communications, home services, publishing, hospitality. Some of them worked. A couple of them didn't, and I learned as much from the ones that didn't as the ones that did.
What ties all of it together is translation: taking something technically real and making it legible to the people who have to decide what to do about it, without losing the truth of it in the process. That's the job I'm doing now, applied to a bigger question — the energy cost of the AI systems everyone is racing to build. I'm pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, with a research emphasis on data and energy, and building the public case for that work here, one piece at a time.
I also spend a fair amount of time on community leadership — I led strategic planning for the Orofino Chamber of Commerce and served briefly as its president, and I founded ChamberWest, a women-in-business conference that grew to about nine speakers, three hundred attendees, and thirty vendors. I still coach small-business owners on marketing, hiring, and financial planning when they ask.
Off the clock, I'm happiest outside — hiking and mountain biking, time on the water, gardening, and keeping up with my two border collies, Maple and Forest. I'm based in the mountains of Idaho for now, and relocating to Davis, California as the next chapter starts.
Contact
Let's talk.
Editors, co-authors, conference organizers, and anyone thinking hard about what AI actually costs to run — reach out.
ccahorton@gmail.com