Infrastructure Routing Control: The Operative Antitrust Trigger in AI Energy Markets

Antitrust enforcement in AI energy and data center markets is frequently analyzed through the lens of monopoly thresholds—market share, pricing power, and dominant position. Monopoly thresholds are the wrong frame. The operative trigger for enforcement is not whether a firm has achieved monopoly in a downstream application market, but whether it controls a routing layer of the compute-energy infrastructure stack through which rivals must traverse to compete. Hyperscalers accumulating dedicated