At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different kind of stress: a huge and sudden increase in demand for electricity. But National Grid, which operates the local transmission network, was ready.

Just as those kettles started heating up, an AI program sent instructions to a data center in London to slow down some of the facility’s power-hungry chips. This reduction helped make sure there was enough supply to match demand, staving off potential blackouts or damage to electrical hardware. For data centers, which normally guzzle power without consideration for anyone or anything else’s needs, it was a radical departure.

It was also a simulation. In December 2025, engineers sought to test a new breed of data center built to be flexible about its electricity needs, so they re-created the energy demand facing the UK’s grid during a match from the 2020 Euro tournament. They wanted to see how their software, called Conductor, would have responded had it been online at the time.

Conductor is the signature product of Emerald AI, a firm based in Washington, DC, that’s part of a wave of companies trying to figure out whether data centers can work within the confines of the existing electric grid.

This year, Emerald is set to deploy Conductor in a new facility in the part of Virginia known as Data Center Alley, this time connected to the live grid. When overall demand spikes, Conductor will turn down the power used by the data center, while making sure its servers still carry out their timeliest and most important jobs. Emerald’s partners on the project—which include Nvidia and the giant data-center operator Digital Realty—bill it as one of the world’s first “power-flexible AI factories.”

Demonstrating that data centers can participate in this kind of give-and-take could ease what many tech leaders identify as the bottleneck in getting facilities online: It takes far longer to get approval for, construct, and connect new power plants than to build data centers. PJM, the grid operator in Virginia and the largest one in the US, for instance, needs eight years to bring new generation online, according to RMI, an energy research and advocacy group. “We need to solve the energy equation,” says Josh Parker, head of sustainability at Nvidia. “AI factory flexibility is the bridge between the incredible demand for AI and the immediate limitations of our energy grid.”

Speed, though, is only one of the issues. Once facilities do plug in, neighbors often criticize them for drawing too much electricity and contributing to rising prices. They say the data centers generate more noise than they do long-term jobs, contribute to pollution, and threaten to put people out of work. Organizers stalled over $150 billion worth of projects in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and policymakers alert to the public mood are starting to impose limitations on development.

More than a dozen states are considering bans, and local moratoriums are in effect in places like Minneapolis and DeKalb County in Georgia. At the federal level, the GRID Act, a bipartisan bill in the US Senate, proposes to sever new data centers from public grids entirely. Some operators are already moving that way by trying to develop their own power generation.

Rather than rushing to build new power plants, companies could find part of the solution to the crunch right under our noses—or, more precisely, in the transmission lines under our feet and above our heads. The existing system operates near its full capacity during only a small number of high-demand hours throughout the year. This means, some grid experts argue, that if data centers can limit the power they draw during those stretches, they won’t need to wait for big infrastructure upgrades or build their own off-grid generation. 

Indeed, a growing number of studies have shown there could be plenty of power available for data centers that can flex. A widely discussed 2025 report from researchers at Duke University found that the US grid could offer an additional 76 gigawatts—about 5% of its entire capacity, and about enough to accommodate projected data-center growth in the US through 2030—to facilities that are willing to reduce their usage just 0.25% of the time. That’s about 22 hours a year. And when researchers from Princeton University and two grid-modernization companies looked at locations for new data centers in the PJM region, their report, which was funded by Google, found that a 500-megawatt facility capable of flexing for less than 1% of the year could reach full operation three to five years faster than one that’s inflexible. 

Flexible power connections could also help data centers address some of their PR problems. By decreasing their draw at times of grid stress, for instance, they could avoid diverting power from where it’s most needed, thus boosting stability. By using existing capacity, they might be able to reduce the need for new fossil-fuel power plants and spread fixed costs over more electricity users, pushing prices down. 

The AI power pinch is attracting resources and research into strategies for grid flexibility overall, which could help negotiate a tricky period: Taken together with electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and other sectors, data centers are helping drive what analysts predict will be a 25% increase in US electricity demand by 2030 compared with 2023 levels.

Ideally, flexibility gives grid operators more control over the flow of electrons, making them leaders of a harmonious ensemble rather than hostages to inflexible electricity requirements. That will help them manage demand spikes across the entire system and deal more effectively with the intermittent nature of renewables like wind and solar. “Demand flexibility is incredibly useful for power grids,” says Johanna Mathieu, a grid expert at the University of Michigan. “It helps reduce electricity costs and improve grid reliability.”

But while advocates see plenty of benefits, the concept brings complexity. For data centers, compromising on energy needs can be a hard sell. Flexibility requires utilities and grid operators, which tend to be operationally conservative, to change long-held practices. And some skeptics also say that flexibility distracts from the very real need to build more grid infrastructure faster, and could even pose risks to our electricity supply. 

Still, some technologists, grid operators, and utilities are hoping to show that flexibility works—not only in white papers or simulations but in real life. 

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The poster children for data-center growth default toward inflexibility. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Oracle have proposed enormous new centers, many of which would rely on off-grid, natural-­gas-burning power plants. When xAI wanted to speed up the buildout of the Colossus site outside Memphis, Tennessee, it rolled up with gas turbines on flatbed trucks. The facility, now in operation, is facing blowback from regulators and residents about the spike it’s causing in emissions and other pollution. In any case, there aren’t enough gas turbines worldwide to meet the demand from data-center operators. 

One big obstacle for anyone demanding a lot of power is that our grids are mostly rigid. They’re designed to supply enough power to meet total demand when it’s highest, even if that’s for only a relatively small number of hours a year. That conservative approach is a simple route to reliability, but it means that the grid has quite a bit of headroom. “The grid is already overbuilt by a lot. If you were an airline running at 30% utilization, you would not buy more planes,” says Amit Narayan, the cofounder and CEO of GridCare, a company developing flexibility technologies, referring to a 2025 Stanford study of transmission lines in western North America. “If you are running a grid at 30% utilization, there’s no scientific reason you can’t go to 60.” 

“If you were an airline running at 30% utilization, you would not buy more planes. If you are running a grid at 30% utilization, there’s no scientific reason you can’t go to 60.”

To be fair, the idea of flexibility isn’t entirely foreign to grid operators. For decades, they’ve practiced a technique called demand response: When it looks as if demand will get too close to supply, as it might during a heat wave when many people turn on the AC at the same time, they call large commercial or industrial facilities and ask them to shut down parts of their operations. This method can help avoid the need to fire up so-called peaker plants, which run on fossil fuels, but it’s slow, imprecise, and hard to scale.

In the 2000s, as the adoption of technologies like electric cars and solar panels presented new challenges, more internet-­connected grids also provided new means of flexibility. Virtual power plants, or VPPs, offered a smarter, faster, more granular alternative. Electricity customers ranging from factories to homeowners with smart thermostats, solar panels, or big batteries would allow the utility to adjust their draw to help meet demand—often getting paid for their (frequently unnoticed) trouble. 

After the generative AI boom began with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, some companies began to see flexibility as a way to get data centers set up more easily, efficiently, and affordably. If they bring AI money into existing grids and reduce or defer the need for expensive upgrades, data centers could actually help spread out fixed costs so as to lower rates for other users. A study from Duke University published this past February, for instance, found that flexibility could reduce rates by 0.5% to 2.8%. 

The trick is figuring out how data centers, notorious power hogs, can keep operating when their flexible connections are throttled. Flexibility specialists envision three possible ways. The simplest is for the new data center to install on-site backup power storage or generation to tap when the grid is maxed out—at their own expense, of course.

A facility could also fill the gap by drawing on a VPP. The utility would turn down the electricity going to users who signed up for the VPP, and the data center would pay them for their flexibility. This method wouldn’t require any major infrastructure, but it would require the utility to have a big VPP program and to coordinate the exchange at a time when the grid was under stress. While VPPs exist to some extent in nearly 40 states, the rules governing them vary widely, and they are empowered to do more in some areas than in others. 

Finally, a data center could simply use less power at peak times. The conventional wisdom is that they won’t go for such limits, particularly when every number-­crunching server can feel like a goose potentially laying little golden eggs. But some experts are betting that the value of getting up and running quickly is enough to change their minds. “There is a clear and growing trend,” says Ayse Coskun, chief scientist at Emerald AI. “Operators are increasingly willing to trade some level of flexibility for faster grid interconnection.” 

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GridCare, a startup based in Silicon Valley, was one of the first companies to use flexibility to get data centers online quickly. Instead of looking at grids only in worst-case scenarios when electricity demand is highest, the company analyzes the system under all conditions, explains CEO Narayan, who studied smart grids at Stanford. It feeds every part of the grid—including power plants, lines, substations, and homes—into a generative AI model that creates a “digital twin” for different grid configurations. It then picks out results that could unlock capacity while maintaining reliability, and it feeds those into another model trained on the physics of electrical components like resistors and capacitors to make sure they’re realistic.

GridCare found its first customer in the Silicon Forest, an area in the Pacific Northwest named for the trees that dominate the landscape and the IT industry that has more recently sprouted up there. The local grid needed more capacity to support more data centers. “Data centers wanted ‘speed to power,’” says Isaac Barrow, a manager of data-center relations at Portland General Electric, or PGE, the local power generator and distributor, “but transmission buildout is a long process that’s very costly.”

In 2024, Aligned Data Centers came to PGE wanting to expand its operation in Hillsboro, Oregon, and PGE followed a recommendation from GridCare. Aligned will install a 31-megawatt battery, set to be in service in May 2027, and decrease its draw by up to that amount when the grid becomes congested. Bundled with other flexibility measures, that battery has allowed PGE to increase the capacity it can offer Aligned and other nearby operators by 80 megawatts without any new power plants. Though the buildout of data centers in Hillsboro has faced plenty of pushback from locals, Barrow points out that it could have the knock-on effect of lowering costs for ratepayers, because it spreads out the tab.

Other companies are promoting different flavors of flexibility. Google has been moving processing loads from facilities in areas experiencing demand spikes to those in less stressed spots since 2023. It’s signed agreements with five utilities, including the Tennessee Valley Authority and Indiana Michigan Power, that add as much as a gigawatt of flexibility. 

Voltus, a major VPP provider across the US and Canada, markets a “bring your own capacity” program in which a data-­center company can fund a VPP nearby. The grid operator can use the VPP to decrease demand at busy times, and participants get a financial thank-you. “We can spin up new VPPs on the order of months,” says Emily Orvis, Voltus’s vice president of energy markets. In June, the company signed their first such data-center deal: a three-year plan in which Google will bankroll a VPP in the PJM interconnection.

Of all the approaches to flexibility, Emerald AI’s may be the most ambitious: asking data centers to dial into the grid’s needs. The company’s Conductor software, which can run on premises or in the cloud, builds on the research of chief scientist Coskun. Her group at Boston University showed in a pair of 2013 papers that a data center could watch the grid and help balance big power fluctuations, such as the intermittent effects of solar and wind power. By 2022, she and her colleagues had tested their methods on a cluster of 36 research servers and shown that the system could respect power limits without breaking the processes it was running. 

One of the most important questions for Conductor is deciding which AI processes can be slowed down to save energy without kneecapping performance. A lot of companies label their jobs by priority—a real-time chatbot query, for instance, might outrank something like a web search that’s part of a deep research project. When they don’t, Emerald AI tries to infer priority from the nature of the job. Conductor then analyzes the AI workload to determine how tweaking the power to a given processor will affect the performance and help meet the usage limits set by the grid operator.

“The performance curve changes for different kinds of workloads,” says Coskun. “Each AI job is going to have a different location on that curve. Our intelligence is figuring out where you are on that curve.” 

Last year, Emerald AI began assessing the technology’s readiness for real-world use in a series of tests, raising the difficulty each time. The trials were carried out in partnership with the Data Center Flexible Load Initiative—a collaboration among tech companies like Google and Nvidia, utilities like Duke Energy, and grid operators like PJM that aims to help establish a repeatable framework for power-­flexible data centers.

The first challenge was in Phoenix, a fast-growing computing hub. For the test, Conductor took control of a group of server racks laden with 256 Nvidia A100 GPUs—hardware that can use about as much power as around 170 US homes. When presented with a simulation of a busy grid, Conductor reduced the power to the chips by 25% for three hours, while maintaining acceptable computing performance. Emerald AI and its partners reported the results in a paper in Nature Energy in December 2025.

The next trial forced the system to juggle surprise grid fluctuations without advance warning and redirect AI jobs from a data center in Virginia to a less busy one in Chicago. Then, in London, Conductor took the reins of equipment beyond the main GPU processors and faced a more complicated mix of fluctuations, including very short and long bouts of congestion—plus the notorious teakettle effect.

The progress so far shows that flexibility can work, at least in some situations, but only a small fraction of operators have pursued it as yet. “We’re just in the beginning innings of the game,” says Jesse Jenkins, one of the authors of the 2025 Princeton study and cofounder of Firma, a startup that works on data-center flexibility. “People are recognizing that this is a potential solution. The motivation is there; there are some bespoke examples. But there’s no uniform solution set that’s the default option, which is where we need to get.”

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While data centers are going up across the US, no place on Earth comes close to the accumulated computing muscle in Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley. The region is home to around 500 compute-crunching facilities, which represent 13% of the entire world’s capacity; the next two hot spots, Beijing and Oregon, contain 6% each.

There are proposals to build hundreds more facilities in Virginia, but a government study found that the state’s electricity demand will increase 183% (around 26 gigawatts) by 2040 if they all go forward, and supporting even half would be difficult. The power-flexible data center that Emerald AI, Nvidia, Digital Realty, and their partners are building in the suburb of Manassas could demonstrate how data centers can squeeze the power they need out of existing capacity. The facility, slated to come online later this year, is intended to give Conductor the chance to manage power at the largest scale yet and to respond to conditions on a live grid for the first time. In the UK demonstration, Conductor managed a 130-kilowatt AI cluster; in Manassas, it will pull the strings of a 96-megawatt hyperscale AI factory. 

Some degree of flex will play a key role as we transition away from fossil fuels and toward a future that has to juggle technologies like solar and wind power, batteries, and electric cars.

For PJM, the Manassas facility points to a potential path through the current power crunch. “We think data-center flexibility, in different forms, will be essential for the reliable integration of data-center load over the short to mid term,” says Scott Baker, who manages demand-side markets at PJM. 

But not all grid experts are so sanguine. PJM’s market monitor, which oversees the grid operator, says there are no workarounds when it comes to adding capacity. “The notion that large amounts of data-center load can be added without adding new generation is magical thinking,” says Joseph Bowring, an economist and the head of PJM’s market monitor since 1999.

One problem, he says, is that there’s no way to guarantee that a data center will actually take less power when demand is high. That is, absent any legal or regulatory push for flexibility or compliance, the utility won’t be able to step in to help prevent, say, a blackout. Utilities can rely on resources like power plants, but they can’t control or rely on data centers. “They do not want to be fully interruptible,” Bowring says of the facilities.

Stephen Empedocles, an advisor for technology companies, views flexibility as more of a tool than a silver bullet. “These approaches are excellent for improving grid reliability and getting more out of the infrastructure we already have,” he says, “but they are optimization tools.” They’re not substitutes for the “generation, transmission, and distribution expansion that will still be required,” he continues.

Flexibility advocates agree that over the long term, whether or not AI continues to boom, electrification will drive a need for more generation and transmission. Some degree of flex will play a key role in using grid infrastructure better as we transition away from fossil fuels and toward a future that has to juggle technologies like solar and wind power, batteries, and electric cars. A report published by the International Renewable Energy Agency in January 2026 found that grids around the world will need three times as much flexibility in 2030 as they had in 2019—and 10 times as much by 2050—to balance increasing demand with fluctuating supplies of renewable energy. 

The challenge of powering AI could provide just the spark we need to do the work of designing and building smarter, more flexible grids, says Coskun. “I think with a crisis like this, there’s no quick solution,” she says. “Sometimes a crisis like this creates an opportunity to do something differently.” 

Amos Zeeberg is a freelance science and technology journalist based in Bucharest. He’s developing a book about technology networks, including electric grids.

Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for athletes who could break world records and usher in the age of superhumanity.

On Sunday, May 24, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs. The founders say they’re challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives. Critics say the event is an embarrassment, that it glamorizes the use of dangerous substances and puts lives at risk. 

The open-air venue was compact and decked out in bright blue, with a six-lane, 100-meter track down one side, a four-lane Olympic-length swimming pool down the other, and a weightlifting platform and stage at the front. You could see the golden façade of the Trump Hotel looming in the background. The scene had all the trappings of an NFL game, with the too-loud music and crowd work on the big screen—a “flex cam”  gave the well-muscled an excuse to unveil their biceps. Between events, adverts flashed up for the line of performance products sold by Enhanced, the company behind the event: injectable peptides that supposedly support cellular energy and skin elasticity, daily supplement powders with names like “Stronger” and “Longer.”

Australian swimmer James Magnussen was the first athlete to sign up with Enhanced but hasn’t broken any world records. He finished last in his two events in Las Vegas.

The day started with the weightlifters, under the blazing sun. But by 4 p.m., only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift. Two had pulled out injured. Some athletes were competing without taking drugs because of the money on offer, and as the competition went on, they had the better of their enhanced peers: Hunter Amstrong, a 25-year-old American swimmer and triple Olympic medalist, won the backstroke by more than a second. In the men’s 100-meter sprint, the non-enhanced US athlete Fred Kerley romped to an easy victory. “Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said of his doped opponents in his post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”

At the bar, bodybuilders swapped before-and-after pictures and talked about their stacks, and VCs and finance bros traded LinkedIn details. Lukas Lakutsin, a 6-foot-10, 354-pound Russian bodybuilder who was milling around the entrance to the VIP suites, initially told me he didn’t use any performance-enhancing drugs. Except testosterone replacement therapy, of course. But he didn’t think that really counted. “I’m almost 34 years old,” he said. “I need to do this to stay strong.”

Jeremy Sigal, an influencer and author, wore a USA tank top that showed off hugely muscled arms adorned with prison tattoos. He told me he was proudly natural, in both his health and his personal life. “I’ve got an exceptional credit score,” he said. He has written 12 books on marketing and leadership. Later, I looked up his most recent book online. It’s called Simp to Pimp: 10 Steps to Fix Why She’s Not Banging You and lists AI as a coauthor.

What I saw in Las Vegas probably wasn’t the future of sport. But it was a perfect encapsulation of our present moment, as Silicon Valley biohackers, alt-right looksmaxxers, Make America Healthy Again boosters, and longevity-obsessed scientists all vie to remake reality in their own image. For them, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future where medical advances push the human race to new heights, and where they never have to get old. 

I’ve tracked Enhanced’s journey from a crazy idea scribbled on a napkin to a public company valued at $1.2 billion. Behind the scenes, there have been power struggles, life-changing victories, and moments of total farce. As I recently, finally, watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: Were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

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In December 2022, the Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza flew to Miami to spend New Year’s Eve with his friend and mentor Peter Thiel. A decade earlier, D’Souza had helped Thiel orchestrate the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker—a stunning revenge against the gossipy New York media blog that had outed him as gay. Now he was armed with a disruptive idea that he thought Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, would love. It was inspired by the buff bodies he’d been seeing at the gym, highlighting a disconnect between a workout culture where the use of steroids was an open secret and a sporting establishment where it was, at least on paper, an inviolable taboo.

D’Souza told me that Thiel had previously introduced him to Christian Angermayer, a German biotech billionaire, who would come onboard at Enhanced. He’s funded clinical trials of psychedelics through his company Atai Life Sciences and is helping bring them into the medical mainstream as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Angermayer says he spotted an opportunity to do the same thing for steroids. What he really wants is to redefine medicine, he told me. Its focus has already changed from treating disease to trying to prevent it; actively enhancing people’s health, he says, is just the next logical step.

By early 2024, Angermayer had brought his own people into key roles. The team included Michael Sagner, an anti-aging expert and private doctor who works with many of Hollywood’s leading men, and Max Martin, who has the jawline and cheekbones of an Instagram looksmaxxing influencer and the boundless enthusiasm of a puppy. (He started his own enhancement program a few years ago, when he was just 27.) Sagner would head up Enhanced’s medical commission, making sure the games were safe for the athletes. It was Martin’s job to make sure they actually happened. 

Tensions sparked as D’Souza’s freewheeling style clashed with the more sensible image that Sagner and others were now keen to present. “It was not just his personality and his abrasive way of talking,” Sagner told me recently. “Even when he was briefed on a scientific fact, he would just completely ignore it and say something outrageous.”

But the more outrageous D’Souza got, the more attention his idea received. In February 2024, James Magnussen, a retired Australian swimmer, became the organization’s first official athlete, and Enhanced promised to pay a million dollars to him, or anyone else, who could break the world record in the 50-meter freestyle.

The notion of a “steroid olympics,” as many have dubbed the Enhanced Games, had been kicking around for decades—for instance, in a Wired article from the early 2000s and an SNL sketch from the 1980s. Two things helped finally make the Enhanced Games a reality. First, in November 2024, Donald Trump was again elected president of the United States. The Biden administration had been actively hostile to the games, but the founders saw a more receptive political environment in Trump world. Not long after the election, Enhanced announced a new tranche of funding led by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm whose partners include Donald Trump Jr.

And second, in February 2025, an enhanced swimmer finished the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in human history. It wasn’t Magnussen, though. He had been injecting himself with testosterone to grow muscle, plus a cocktail of peptides that aimed to speed up recovery—but his journey hadn’t quite worked the way he’d planned.

A combination of reputational issues (no pools wanted to host his training) and physical complications (the regimen did help him get stronger, but he packed on so much muscle that it slowed him down in the water) meant he watched from the sidelines as the Bulgarian-Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev—who had finished fifth at the Paris Olympics in 2024—came in two-hundredths of a second under the record and won a million-dollar payout from Enhanced. The idea has always been that breaking records would effectively prove the legitimacy of this enhancement project: Look what we can do now. 

Gkolomeev, though, had a different motivation for participating: “One successful year in the Enhanced Games and I could make as much as I would in almost 10 careers,” he told me not long after setting the new record (notably, wearing a kind of “supersuit” that’s been banned by World Aquatics since 2010). Enhanced was paying its athletes a regular salary, on top of any potential bonus. And he had a young family to support and feared that the four-year stretch to the next Olympics would be long and precarious. 

In May 2025, with a world record in the bag and a friendly administration in the White House, Enhanced was ready to announce its first games: They’d take place in May 2026 at Resorts World in Las Vegas. 

At the same time, D’Souza made another big reveal: Enhanced Performance Products, a line of supplements available for a monthly subscription. The Enhanced Games now seemed less like a sporting event and more like a loss leader for selling testosterone injections, GLP-1s, or a range of peptides that are claimed, with little scientific evidence, to improve sleep or skin elasticity. Perhaps it was all a brilliantly executed marketing stunt.

“The games themselves now seem almost secondary to what appears to be an online marketplace for hormones, peptides, and other performance-enhancing compounds,” says Astrid Kristine Bjørnebekk, a steroids expert at Oslo University Hospital. “From my perspective, this significantly changes the nature of the project. It is one thing to organize a closed sporting event built around controversial principles, but openly marketing and commercializing substances such as testosterone, hGH, GLP-1 drugs, peptides, and other pharmacological compounds is something else entirely.”

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As the games approached, more athletes joined. Some were genuinely elite. The US sprinter Kerley—who is serving a two-year ban for missing three drug tests—had won silver in the 100 meters in the Tokyo Olympics and a bronze in Paris. Ben Proud, a British swimmer, had won silver at the Paris Olympics and dozens of medals at world and European championships and the Commonwealth Games. He had been mulling over joining the Enhanced Games ever since the idea first emerged, but the tipping point seemed to come when Gkolomeev’s record was announced. 

Some participants, like Magnussen and another swimmer, Megan Romano, had been tempted out of retirement. Romano hadn’t swum competitively for almost a decade. Others were at the start of their careers but ready to cash in their chips and bid goodbye to Olympic dreams for a potential six-figure payday. The $1 million payouts were reserved for records in the two flagship events—the 50-meter freestyle and the 100-meter sprint—but winning any other event would mean a prize of $250,000, with an additional $250,000 bonus for setting a world record.

Athletes would get paid even if they just showed up and finished last—as much as $50,000. This is all on top of the salaries that stretched into six figures in some cases, making the payout from the games more than many athletes make in a year.

Sport’s governing bodies reacted to each new athlete announcement with fury. World Aquatics threatened to ban for life any athlete who participated in the games, even if they didn’t take any drugs. Enhanced responded with an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against the global swimming organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and USA Swimming, alleging misuse of monopoly power.

In November 2025, a court in New York dismissed the case. Three days later, D’Souza, the mind behind the entire project, was out. A notice on Enhanced’s website said he had “transitioned out of the company’s day-to-day operations.” Martin would take over as CEO. “The investors basically said we need someone a bit more serious,” Sagner told me. In conversations, execs at Enhanced played down any suggestion of a feud—D’Souza was simply the ideas man, with little interest in the day-to-day dreariness of actually running a company. (Enhanced spokesperson Chris Jones wrote in a statement that “there is no tension between Aron and Enhanced that I’m aware of.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.)

I got the sense that Enhanced, in its new iteration as a pharmaceutical subscription company, was almost embarrassed by the games. When I visited enhanced.com a couple of months before the event, they had been relegated to a sub-heading on the home page. D’Souza’s showmanship had helped get attention for what was becoming a run-of-the-mill telehealth business like Hims & Hers—albeit one well timed to take advantage of a shifting regulatory landscape around peptides, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US secretary of health and human services, has been pushing the FDA to approve despite a lack of evidence that they’re actually effective. 

Sagner is still loosely involved with Enhanced, but he says the medical commission was not consulted before it launched its line of performance products. (Jones did not respond to a question regarding this claim.) Sagner is scathing about what he sees as the “hype” around peptides. “I can tell you already, peptides do nothing,” he says—with the exception of human growth hormone and GLP-1. “The peptides that people use, black-market peptides that they buy online—they do nothing. We have tested them; 80% of them contain nothing. It’s saline solution, salt water, and some of them are contaminated.”

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At the end of January 2026, a group of around 40 swimmers, weightlifters, and sprinters arrived in Abu Dhabi to start their individualized enhancement “protocol,” as Enhanced calls it. Officially, they would be taking part in a clinical trial, pending approval by the Abu Dhabi government and overseen by Guido Pieles, a Qatar-based cardiologist who has taken over the reins of Enhanced’s medical commission from Sagner.

They would be allowed to choose only from a menu  of specific FDA-approved drugs. Pieles broke them down into five categories: testosterone variants and growth hormones, which can both boost muscle mass; metabolic modulators that can tweak how the body burns fat; stimulants like Adderall to improve focus; and EPO, which can increase the amount of oxygen the blood is able to carry. While Enhanced’s team might recommend particular things, the athletes would have the final say on what they wanted to take, if anything. (As Oslo University’s Bjørnebekk points out, FDA approval “does not mean the substances are inherently safe, particularly not when used for enhancement purposes.”) 

There would be regular blood tests, heart scans, and brain scans and access to the best training facilities money could buy. Pieles and others say the clinical trial will help inform the line of supplements Enhanced is offering consumers, but there’s actually very little overlap between the drugs the athletes were taking and the substances the company is currently selling.  

Not long after they arrived in the Middle East, the athletes were awakened by the sound of explosions at a military base near their hotel. The US and Israel had struck Iran, and the Iranian regime was responding by peppering the region with missiles. “It wasn’t a pleasant situation,” says Andrii Govorov, the world record holder in the 50-meter butterfly, who a year earlier had become one of the first swimmers to join Enhanced. Govorov had some experience in these matters—back in Ukraine, he’d had a business selling cars that helped fund his swimming career, but he’d lost it after the Russian invasion.

Swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting were the focus of the first Enhanced Games but in many ways the sports were the sideshow.

The conflict exacerbated delays in getting approval for the clinical trial and sourcing the drugs, and as a result, what was supposed to be a 12-week enhancement protocol got cut down to eight weeks. The athletes didn’t actually start taking the drugs until toward the end of March. For those who had always been clean, that represented the irreversible crossing of a line. “The first injection was very emotional, very tricky to navigate,” says Proud. “For me, that was the day I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.”

Proud was joined in the enhancement program by his girlfriend, Emily Barclay, who had swum at college level without ever appearing at a major international event; she was working as a swimming teacher at a school in England. After that first injection, they left Abu Dhabi and spent a few days in Dubai as they reckoned with what they had done. “I just couldn’t be around the team,” Proud says. “I wanted to be by myself and feel those feelings, because it is a big deal to make that step, and I felt it.”

Those feelings were soon forgotten, though, as the drugs kicked in. Proud says he had incredible energy, and a drive to train that he hadn’t experienced before. Shania Collins, an American sprinter, says she had “increased strength, increased recovery, and increased mental clarity at practice.” Sagner and several athletes admitted there were some side effects: acne and some swelling around the joints; unwanted hair growth for the women, unwanted hair loss for the men.

One thing the athletes wouldn’t talk about, though, is what drugs they were actually taking. They all had the same reason: not wanting to encourage copycats who might take enhancements without a doctor on hand to tailor programs to their needs. 

The one exception was Thor Björnsson (testosterone, deca-durabolin, anastrozole, halotestin), a hulking Icelandic deadlifter and former World’s Strongest Man who played The Mountain on Game of Thrones. Björnsson first heard about the games on Joe Rogan’s podcast and was immediately interested. The rules for strongman competitions are somewhat less stringent than those for Olympic sports, though, and he actually had to reduce the number of substances he was taking to meet Enhanced’s FDA requirements.

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That same week, it was finally go time. The athletes and coaches left Abu Dhabi and flew to Las Vegas, where they were put up in five-star luxury at the Conrad hotel inside Resorts World while they made their final preparations. 

When I got there a few weeks later, toward the end of May, I found it jarring to see these hulking presences walking around the casino in their Enhanced sportswear, weaving their way through packs of half-drunk tourists, with slot machines flashing in the background and cigarette smoke hanging in the air. I had expected the games to be a bigger deal within the city itself, but they were just one of a thousand things happening in Vegas that weekend—drowned out by a series of BTS shows at the football stadium, by the Golden Knights in the NHL playoffs, by No Doubt’s residency at the Sphere.

If this was a sporting earthquake, it was one whose tremors were mainly being felt online, where bodybuilding influencers livestreamed to their followers on Kick and Twitch, and where thousands watched on YouTube and Rumble. (D’Souza once told me he’d had “every major sports broadcaster” vying for the rights; in the end, Enhanced struck an exclusive streaming deal with Roku in the US.) 

On the morning of the games, Enhanced held a medical symposium that was supposed to provide a taste of the company’s long-term objectives. The first speaker was Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed entrepreneur famous for plowing his personal fortune into wild attempts to reverse his aging: receiving transfusions of his teenage son’s plasma, measuring his nighttime erections, taking more than 100 supplement pills a day. He spends $2 million per year on all this, but he looked pale and vampiric as he delivered the slightly off-brand message that, really, the most important thing was getting a good night’s sleep: “You don’t need to chase IV infusions; you don’t need to chase crystals. You don’t really need to do much of anything.”

At 2 p.m., I took two escalators from the conference room down to the arena, where spectators were filtering in. Though it had cost $50 million, it had been constructed in just three and a half weeks, and it showed; on the media tour the previous day, there were still loose screws on the floor of the bleachers. 

There were a few thousand seats in an open grandstand down one side, and two rows of VIP suites on the other. No tickets were sold, so it was a strange mix of invited guests, investors, and influencers, some of whom had reportedly been flown in from Los Angeles on a chartered jet. The rapper Tyga was the biggest name to grace the “blue carpet,” although I did also spot Fabio James, a Michael Jackson look-alike who has had surgery to make the resemblance even stronger. Rumors swirled that Peter Thiel might show up; they proved unfounded.

A few hours before the doors opened, journalists got a stern message from the organizers trying to bar us from interviewing guests. Still, I talked to a Cambridge professor who wanted to use Enhanced as a case study in innovation for his MBA students, a retired Brazilian swimmer with the Olympic rings tattooed on his forearm, and a biotech investor wearing an Enron hat. Proud’s family and friends were sheltered from the blazing sun in the shadow of the big screen. 

D’Souza was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he really mentioned at all—not during the introductory press conference, where Martin was introduced as the “founder of the Enhanced Games,” nor during the event itself, where the athletes showered praise on Angermayer and Martin. But the tens of millions D’Souza had banked from the stock listing likely softened any blow. Plus, he’s already moved on to his next provocative venture: an AI-powered arbitration platform designed to scrutinize the work of journalists on behalf of the rich and powerful.

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As the sun set behind the hills, casting the arena in soft gold light, there were still no world records. That and the wins for clean athletes seemed to put the whole Enhanced project in jeopardy—the knives were already being sharpened online. I asked the organizers whether this threatened the legitimacy of the project. 

“Our response is that enhancements help athletes improve and, in some cases, break records. And yes, some non-enhanced athletes also won—because talent and ability also matter,” Enhanced’s Jones emailed last week. “Breaking world records is incredibly hard as the margin is infinitesimal, as we witnessed. Ignoring that 13 athletes some of whom 10 years later broke personal bests is disingenuous and selective reporting.” 

Megan Romano was one of them, swimming faster in the 50-meter freestyle at 35 than she had at 22. And Emily Barclay knocked two seconds off her fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle, coming in second in that event and winning the 50-meter freestyle; she went home with a check for $375,000. “No one’s ever heard of this girl,” said Enhanced swim coach Brett Hawke afterwards. “She’s retired; she’s a nobody. She comes out tonight and swims a time that would have got a bronze medal in Paris.” For all the talk of “superhumanity” and pushing the boundaries of performance, making a 35-year-old feel 22 again is probably the perfect marketing message for the products Enhanced wants to sell. 

Enhanced’s executives say people should take enhancements only with medical supervision, but price could be a barrier to heeding that advice. The battery of health tests the company was giving its athletes in the run-up to the games cost $25,000 per athlete per month. The drugs themselves start at $75 a month and go up toward $200. While Jones says the products “are in line with industry price points,” there were almost certainly people watching who saw the drug-altered physiques of athletes like Gkolomeev or Magnussen and decided to find cheaper, less safe alternatives on unlicensed websites.

“Many of these substances require medical supervision and prescriptions, and several are associated with potentially serious long-term health consequences,” says Bjørnebekk. “Presenting them in this lifestyle-oriented and commercial format risks normalizing use while downplaying the medical risks and uncertainties.”

Before the night was over,  Gkolomeev again had the chance to right the Enhanced ship. The final event of the night was the men’s 50-meter freestyle swim. His 2025 time had been surpassed by the Australian swimmer Cam McEvoy (without a supersuit) at the China Swimming Open a couple of months before, so he needed to lose another two-hundredths of a second to beat the new record of 20.88 seconds. 

Gkolomeev was wearing the same supersuit he’d used the previous year, and he’d shaved off his mustache for a little extra streamlining. But he messed up his start—doing four kicks instead of five—and was trailing Proud at the halfway mark. His long arms levered him forward, though, and he reached the wall in 20.81. The spectators were on their feet as “WORLD RECORD” flashed red on the big screen. Martin vaulted over the glass partition from the VIP suites, beaming, to embrace Gkolomeev. They had their record.

Or did they? Online, people shared screenshots from the video feed, purporting to show that the clock had stopped before Gkolomeev’s hand touched the pressure sensor at the end of the pool. An Enhanced spokesperson gave a statement to the Guardian dismissing this as “completely unfounded internet drivel.” But hey—live by the sword, die by the sword. It’s quite possible Gkolomeev didn’t care. He had another million in the bank. 

It remains to be seen if it’ll work out so well for the other athletes. Enhanced organizers recently announced a prize of $10 million for anyone who can break Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record in 2027. They are adamant that the games will happen again next year. If they don’t, dozens of sporting careers will be over, and the athletes will join the long list of victims of VC-backed disruption.

My personal prediction is that Enhanced will pivot away from the risk and uncertainty of a flagship event—the company’s valuation plunged by almost $800 million when markets opened after what was perceived as an underwhelming set of results in Vegas. I expect you’ll see individual stunts and challenges, tightly controlled and filmed for virality and probably featuring your favorite YouTubers—think Björnsson bench-pressing Jake Paul.

D’Souza’s initial idea has served its purpose by capturing the world’s attention. But that won’t necessarily translate into success either. Though the company has had plenty of hype over the last 12 months, SEC filings published as part of its stock exchange listing reveal that it generated only $2,755 in revenue from its enhancements business in the first three months of 2026. Would what happened in Vegas be enough to juice sales?

As the athletes gathered on the stage to receive their prizes, Martin took the microphone and addressed the crowd. “Enhanced is culture,” he said. “We are at the pulse of where the world is going.” On this, at least, he’s probably right. Testosterone replacement therapy is rapidly moving into the mainstream, and while the science may still not be there on peptides, they have certainly exploded in popularity in the two years since Enhanced launched. And there are undoubtedly more substances yet to be discovered that will promise to improve people’s lives, or at least hold their appearance in stasis. The enhanced age is upon us, whether we want it or not. 

As the fireworks went off and the Killers closed out the event with “When You Were Young” (“Congratulations to … whoever deserves it,” said frontman Brandon Flowers), I wondered what that might mean for us mere mortals. Invoking Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a story about drugs and Las Vegas may be a cliché, but it struck me that fear played a big part in all of this. Fear of missing out. Fear of getting old. Fear of never making a dime on your life’s pursuit. Fear of waking up one morning and seeing your flabby, sunken face in the mirror while everyone around you shines and grins and thrives with white-toothed, alien smiles.

But the big problem with Enhanced’s vision of superhumanity is the question of who gets to join in. “People will be able to enhance themselves if they have enough money,” Sagner had told me the night before the games. The rest of us, I fear, will just have to function as normal human beings.

Amit Katwala is a journalist and author covering science, culture, and where they collide. His latest book is Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector. He is based in London.