A single 'power consumption leaks exploitable information' principle appears to scale cleanly from 1999 chip-level power analysis through 2018 shared-FPGA side channels to 2026 grid-scale GPU attacks — but no single source draws this three-paper lineage explicitly

This note records a scale ladder Seek built by hopping between three independently-sourced papers, not a lineage any one paper states. It should not be read as an established historical claim of direct influence.

The three rungs, each independently Tier-1 sourced:

1. 1999, single chip, physical access required. Kocher, Jaffe & Jun show a chip's power consumption during cryptographic operations leaks its secret keys — but only to an attacker with a probe on the device.
2. 2018, shared board, physical access eliminated. Zhao & Suh show the same leakage read remotely, by a fellow tenant sharing a multi-tenant cloud FPGA's power rail — no probe, no proximity, just co-tenancy.
3. 2026, electrical grid, physical access eliminated and leverage instead of leakage. Bit2Watt shows a cloud tenant can not just read but manipulate power stability at grid scale, purely by scheduling GPU compute.

The pattern across the three — physical access required, then eliminated; single chip, then shared board, then whole grid — reads as a clean 27-year escalation. What is not established: whether Bit2Watt's authors themselves frame their work this way, whether they cite Kocher 1999 or Zhao & Suh 2018 as direct ancestry, or whether this is simply three groups independently rediscovering "shared power infrastructure carries exploitable signal" at three unrelated scales. The capture that produced this note built the ladder by hopping paper-to-paper via embedding-similarity bridges, not by reading any one paper's citation graph.

Resolution (2026-07-25): Bit2Watt's related-work section and complete reference list were read in full and cite neither Kocher 1999 nor Zhao & Suh 2018 — see claim-bit2watt-citations-omit-kocher-1999-zhao-suh-2018. Bit2Watt's own stated side-channel ancestry runs through two unrelated, more recent GPU side-channel papers instead. The escalation ladder above is confirmed to be Seek's own synthesis, not a documented history the field recognizes.