The Exchanges

Q What do you take from that walk the floor? It's like proximity to customers. It's proximity Team, how did that shape how you think about your go forward mindset?

A Great question. So this is not just about the shop floor. What Andy Groh was teaching you was, you have, you need to have the empathy To be able to relate to every aspect of your business, and when you develop that empathy, and when you practice that empathy by walking on the floor, talking to your shop floor team members who are building your product, they will tell you things, and the things they tell you are going to make the difference between you being a good company and a great company. You do the same thing with your customers. You don't tell them why your product is great and they should buy. You go there to find out what is their pain, And what problems do they want you to solve for them? That's empathy. Then you design your product accordingly. And here's what I can tell you. Our shop floor employees walking there, talking to them, and telling them why it matters, telling them why what they do matters. So when we have our all-hands meetings, or forget the all-hands meetings, if you're having a dinner party with executives, When I toast these days, I always remember to say, we're toasting right now this great champagne or whatever it is that we're toasting, but we're able to do this because there are some technicians on the floor right now. Nobody is policing them, but their pride, their dedication, they're building an amazing product. Let's toast to them.

AI assessment note: “you need to have the empathy To be able to relate to every aspect”

Q Penultimate one. What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?

A I was in China. In a remote part, I had a bad accident where I was, I could have easily bled to death, and I was driven to the hospital, and, uh, it was in a remote town, so through my translator with a few seconds left of my consciousness, I was like, get me a helicopter, get me to Hong Kong, and I don't know the name of the doctor, But I vaguely remember his face in that state, telling to the interpreter, ask him to shut up. I'm going to stitch him up. Otherwise, his body will be flown to Hong Kong. And, and he, and he stitched me up. And, uh, when I look back, uh, there's a very kind thing that he did for me, not listening to me.

AI assessment note: “a very kind thing that he did for me, not listening to me”

Q What will be a very pronounced bottleneck in five years time that we're not really talking about today?

A Societally, globally, I, I would say the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind, uh, to some level of parity. They'll, you know, they'll always be Gaps. But what's happening for the first time in human history, right? It's, it's not even in technology history. In, in human history is next to air, water, shelter, food, electricity becomes almost a necessity for a young kid being born today to have a decent modern life in this digital world. And there's significant swaths of this world that don't have access or affordability to that power. And I think when we look, look five years from now, the need to bring that level of access and affordability is going to be super important.

AI assessment note: “the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind, uh, to some level of parity.”

Q Hence the 1200% increase in stock price. It's, it's compelling. Uh, for you, is it, we spoke earlier about bottlenecks, is it simply regulation and permitting that prevents speed to power? Because your backlog book is insane. It's like twenty billion, I think.

A Yes. So look, here's what happens, right? If you want to build a two gigawatt data center, it's going to take you more than a year and a half, year or two Build at Greenfield. There's an entire supply chain for that, including construction workers to supply chain parts related to that data center. They're all being stressed right now. There's a lot of copper that goes inside a data center. There's a supply chain issue, you know, like related to that. There's a lot of cooling that goes inside a data center. There's a supply chain issue related to that. The tradespeople required to build these extremely large You know, centers. There's a supply chain, you know, related to that. So it takes 12 to 18 months minimum to build something like that. We can stand up that power faster than they can build a data center. So our goal at Bloom is to say power should not be a bottleneck if you rely on us. So what are our constraints? Number one, can they build it in time, their data center, Can we get the permits? And the third part is we need gas. That gas supply needs to be able to come in, right? Um, those are the big bottlenecks. I don't see us delivering the product as a bottleneck right now.

AI assessment note: “Can they build it in time... Can we get the permits? And... we need gas.”

Q you in a dominant slash winning position. When you think about the winners that emerge from this incredible technology revolution, you, you have different layers of the stack. Is it the energy companies that produce this incredible power? Is it chip companies like Nvidia? Is it model companies like Anthropik and OpenAI? When you think about like value accrual in the space, what's the utility and what's the Valuable resource.

A At the end of the day, I would think there are almost all of the sectors are winners. It's, it's, it's just what are the names in each one of those verticals that you mentioned, right? Because if that doesn't exist, then you don't build an ecosystem that sustains. If there are only a couple of winners in this, AI is not going to become ubiquitous. And I absolutely believe AI will become ubiquitous, which means there's an entire chain of, you know, winners. So let's start at the very right. At the very right is the consumer, the customer who procures it and finds greater value using that product than not using that product. So they have to be a winner. So any business, all the way from a mom and pop, restaurant, laundry store, To a very large biomedical company or a, uh, or a, you know, cancer cure hospital has to benefit from it. The people have to benefit from it. They're all winners. Then you start coming to the left. Almost everything in technology ultimately moves to the edge closer to where people are. So it's not just a large, big mega data centers that we are talking about right now, the AI factories. The AI factories ultimately need to have this distribution warehouse of intelligence. Those are the edge data centers residing in every neighborhood like the one we are in right now. They become winners. And then you have the people who develop all the services winning beca…

AI assessment note: “I would think there are almost all of the sectors are winners.”

Q Your backlog is twenty billion, and the manufacturing capacity is a gigawatt today. What's the manufacturing capacity by the end of this year?

A We'll be over two gigawatts, Yes, we said that publicly, and what we also said is going forward, we are not just going to just ramp from two to another big step function or whatever. We have made this based on everything we see in the market today. Think of it almost like an analog dial. Every month, every quarter, we're going to keep adding more capacity as we build. So if you came to our factory, it's a state-of-the-art production facility, but it's also a state-of-the-art construction zone. They're both happening at the same time, and we're able to do that. And it's a state-of-the-art innovation area where we are innovating on our manufacturing processes so we can make it more efficient as we go forward, thanks to AI.

AI assessment note: “We'll be over two gigawatts”

Q What does no one see about what happens when power comes to the edge?

A What they don't see today is in a world where everything is digital, having power outages for any reason is unacceptable. That's like not having air to breathe, because God forbid somebody is doing a surgery. That's going to be a robot relying on all the data, everything coming Electronically, and not having power at that moment is not an option. If you have all the transportation logistics, driverless, And there's a chaos. You cannot rely on some large data center far away with latency, because by then enough damage has happened. You cannot afford the latency. So that needs to happen on the edge. So when everything in life depends so intimately on that power not going off, a pole and a wire running across hundreds of miles, Capable of disruption by mother nature, capable of destruction by bad actors, uh, whether it's on cyber or a physical attack, cannot be the only way that lifeline is delivered to you. So power has to be at the edge without a question for us to realize the entire dream of the digital transformation.

AI assessment note: “What they don't see today is in a world where everything is digital”

Q What does no one see about what happens when power comes to the edge?

A What they don't see today is in a world where everything is digital, having power outages for any reason is unacceptable. That's like not having air to breathe, because God forbid somebody is doing a surgery. That's going to be a robot relying on all the data, everything coming Electronically, and not having power at that moment is not an option. If you have all the transportation logistics, driverless, And there's a chaos. You cannot rely on some large data center far away with latency, because by then enough damage has happened. You cannot afford the latency. So that needs to happen on the edge. So when everything in life depends so intimately on that power not going off, a pole and a wire running across hundreds of miles, Capable of disruption by mother nature, capable of destruction by bad actors, uh, whether it's on cyber or a physical attack, cannot be the only way that lifeline is delivered to you. So power has to be at the edge without a question for us to realize the entire dream of the digital transformation.

AI assessment note: “What they don't see today is in a world where everything is digital”

Q Your backlog is twenty billion, and the manufacturing capacity is a gigawatt today. What's the manufacturing capacity by the end of this year?

A We'll be over two gigawatts, Yes, we said that publicly, and what we also said is going forward, we are not just going to just ramp from two to another big step function or whatever. We have made this based on everything we see in the market today. Think of it almost like an analog dial. Every month, every quarter, we're going to keep adding more capacity as we build. So if you came to our factory, it's a state-of-the-art production facility, but it's also a state-of-the-art construction zone. They're both happening at the same time, and we're able to do that. And it's a state-of-the-art innovation area where we are innovating on our manufacturing processes so we can make it more efficient as we go forward, thanks to AI.

AI assessment note: “We'll be over two gigawatts, Yes, we said that publicly”

Q What do you take from that walk the floor? It's like proximity to customers. It's proximity Team, how did that shape how you think about your go forward mindset?

A Great question. So this is not just about the shop floor. What Andy Groh was teaching you was, you have, you need to have the empathy To be able to relate to every aspect of your business, and when you develop that empathy, and when you practice that empathy by walking on the floor, talking to your shop floor team members who are building your product, they will tell you things, and the things they tell you are going to make the difference between you being a good company and a great company. You do the same thing with your customers. You don't tell them why your product is great and they should buy. You go there to find out what is their pain, And what problems do they want you to solve for them? That's empathy. Then you design your product accordingly. And here's what I can tell you. Our shop floor employees walking there, talking to them, and telling them why it matters, telling them why what they do matters. So when we have our all-hands meetings, or forget the all-hands meetings, if you're having a dinner party with executives, When I toast these days, I always remember to say, we're toasting right now this great champagne or whatever it is that we're toasting, but we're able to do this because there are some technicians on the floor right now. Nobody is policing them, but their pride, their dedication, they're building an amazing product. Let's toast to them.

AI assessment note: “What Andy Groh was teaching you was, you have, you need to have the empathy”

Q What will be a very pronounced bottleneck in five years time that we're not really talking about today?

A Societally, globally, I, I would say the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind, uh, to some level of parity. They'll, you know, they'll always be Gaps. But what's happening for the first time in human history, right? It's, it's not even in technology history. In, in human history is next to air, water, shelter, food, electricity becomes almost a necessity for a young kid being born today to have a decent modern life in this digital world. And there's significant swaths of this world that don't have access or affordability to that power. And I think when we look, look five years from now, the need to bring that level of access and affordability is going to be super important.

AI assessment note: “the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind, uh, to some level of parity”

Q We're both in slightly rarefied airs, um, in terms of, um, the events we go to, the people we spend time with. Candidly, I just see a smaller and smaller number of people make more and more money. Do you not see the same? And as sad as it is, I think AI is doing more to concentrate wealth than it is distribute it.

A I wouldn't disagree with you on the number of people, the, the fewer number of companies that are going to make An unbelievable amount of financial, um, success out of AI. However, there is no known methodology to raise all boats in the world than technology. Technology has been the best equalizer in the history of mankind. Just think about Infant mortality. Think about hunger. Think about clean water. Think about healthcare and the number of things you're able to cure. It is technology that's brought all that to most people in the world. There is probably no force in the world Other than technology that has done that to so many people at such large scale. Is there inequity between the best healthcare and the lowest healthcare? The answer is yes. But has the healthcare of every living person on the planet gotten a lot better than it was because of the technological advances? The answer is yes.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't disagree with you on the number of people”

Q Hence the 1200% increase in stock price. It's, it's compelling. Uh, for you, is it, we spoke earlier about bottlenecks, is it simply regulation and permitting that prevents speed to power? Because your backlog book is insane. It's like twenty billion, I think.

A Yes. So look, here's what happens, right? If you want to build a two gigawatt data center, it's going to take you more than a year and a half, year or two Build at Greenfield. There's an entire supply chain for that, including construction workers to supply chain parts related to that data center. They're all being stressed right now. There's a lot of copper that goes inside a data center. There's a supply chain issue, you know, like related to that. There's a lot of cooling that goes inside a data center. There's a supply chain issue related to that. The tradespeople required to build these extremely large You know, centers. There's a supply chain, you know, related to that. So it takes 12 to 18 months minimum to build something like that. We can stand up that power faster than they can build a data center. So our goal at Bloom is to say power should not be a bottleneck if you rely on us. So what are our constraints? Number one, can they build it in time, their data center, Can we get the permits? And the third part is we need gas. That gas supply needs to be able to come in, right? Um, those are the big bottlenecks. I don't see us delivering the product as a bottleneck right now.

AI assessment note: “So what are our constraints? Number one, can they build it in time... permits... gas”

Q you in a dominant slash winning position. When you think about the winners that emerge from this incredible technology revolution, you, you have different layers of the stack. Is it the energy companies that produce this incredible power? Is it chip companies like Nvidia? Is it model companies like Anthropik and OpenAI? When you think about like value accrual in the space, what's the utility and what's the Valuable resource.

A At the end of the day, I would think there are almost all of the sectors are winners. It's, it's, it's just what are the names in each one of those verticals that you mentioned, right? Because if that doesn't exist, then you don't build an ecosystem that sustains. If there are only a couple of winners in this, AI is not going to become ubiquitous. And I absolutely believe AI will become ubiquitous, which means there's an entire chain of, you know, winners. So let's start at the very right. At the very right is the consumer, the customer who procures it and finds greater value using that product than not using that product. So they have to be a winner. So any business, all the way from a mom and pop, restaurant, laundry store, To a very large biomedical company or a, uh, or a, you know, cancer cure hospital has to benefit from it. The people have to benefit from it. They're all winners. Then you start coming to the left. Almost everything in technology ultimately moves to the edge closer to where people are. So it's not just a large, big mega data centers that we are talking about right now, the AI factories. The AI factories ultimately need to have this distribution warehouse of intelligence. Those are the edge data centers residing in every neighborhood like the one we are in right now. They become winners. And then you have the people who develop all the services winning beca…

AI assessment note: “almost all of the sectors are winners. It's, it's, it's just what are the names”

Q What would you do differently that we're not doing today? I'm not asking you to critique any of the current administration, but like, what would you do to make America a powerhouse and policy and regulation around power?

A So I would break that Like any other business plan into a short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Long-term vision for the world is wherever you live, there's wind, solar, geothermal, something available. You use that electricity when nature gives it to you, and then you bottle that electricity when nature will not give it to you in the form of a hydrogen that you make right on site, and then you recycle that hydrogen using something like bloom. To be able to get reliable, abundant power, wherever you live. So the fact that you become self-reliant in any community, whether you live in Iceland or you live in Sub-Saharan Africa, and not depend on some lifeline, some logistic lifeline bringing you energy, which is critical to your well-being, is huge. That's the vision I have for the long term, and I'm super optimistic about that. Ok, so how do you facilitate that? But in the immediate term, America is endowed with unbelievable amounts of natural gas, which is the best available option molecule, even though it has a carbon footprint. It is the cleanest, the smallest carbon footprint molecule available. We should be able to, along with Australia, along with Canada, along with UAE, along with Qatar, the free world, Be able to provide access of that gas to practically every country in the nation, and it is affordable and economical where we don't have to burn coal. So good should not be…

AI assessment note: “I would break that Like any other business plan into a short-term, mid-term, and long-term.”

Q Can I ask, you know, Oracle have an enormous deal with you. How did Larry Allison end up choosing solid oxide fuel cells to power Oracle data centers and his data centers, and what did that communication conversation look like?

A So, you know, the proof is in the pudding, right? Um, we, before AI came along, we had at least five or six data center customers, and over a period of 10 to 12 years, we've been providing reliable power to edge data centers, other data centers, four megawatts, 10 megawatts, 15 megawatts for a data center, and our very first data center application was in 2013 when eBay Which used to be eBay and PayPal together, and if you think about it, right, PayPal's entire business is that data center, because it's all about transactions, and all those transactions are happening in the data center. So they did not have power in Utah, and they needed power. The choice was to move somewhere else, and they didn't want to move their location, so they relied on us. So that was our first application of a mission critical data center being powered fully by Bloom. And we built that reputation over time. So a couple of years ago, there was a data center in Utah that was being built and had to come online for Oracle's customer and the power systems were delayed. So they came to us and said, can you give us a temporary solution, uh, for a year? I said, absolutely. And, um, We signed a contract with them that 90 days from the day we signed the contract, we would do 50 plus megawatts, which is an unbelievable speed. We delivered that in 55 days instead of 90 days. Power on. And they were thrilled with …

AI assessment note: “that formed the basis for them to say, Why would we go and look”

Q Now, listen, I, I asked some of the best founders in the world this question, but it really intrigues me on mindset. Are you more motivated by the thrill of winning or the fear of failing?

A To lose. Is something I simply cannot contemplate. There's nothing that I do where I put effort, I put time, and I think of failure as an option. Before starting the company, I did the Mars missions. And there, you cannot call a plumber on Mars. You cannot fix something along the way. So what you do is you think through, let me think about the 10 big things. A boom can happen, and it ruins your life. Then you say, okay, I'm going to mitigate that. By every possible workaround, because something's gonna happen. So I hate failure, but the way I deal with failure is risk mitigation. Think about things that can go wrong, and prepare ahead of time for a plan around it, for a workaround around it, because bad things can happen. You can fall down. Falling down is not what I'm concerned about. It's about the getting up.

AI assessment note: “To lose. Is something I simply cannot contemplate.”

Q What would you do differently that we're not doing today? I'm not asking you to critique any of the current administration, but like, what would you do to make America a powerhouse and policy and regulation around power?

A So I would break that Like any other business plan into a short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Long-term vision for the world is wherever you live, there's wind, solar, geothermal, something available. You use that electricity when nature gives it to you, and then you bottle that electricity when nature will not give it to you in the form of a hydrogen that you make right on site, and then you recycle that hydrogen using something like bloom. To be able to get reliable, abundant power, wherever you live. So the fact that you become self-reliant in any community, whether you live in Iceland or you live in Sub-Saharan Africa, and not depend on some lifeline, some logistic lifeline bringing you energy, which is critical to your well-being, is huge. That's the vision I have for the long term, and I'm super optimistic about that. Ok, so how do you facilitate that? But in the immediate term, America is endowed with unbelievable amounts of natural gas, which is the best available option molecule, even though it has a carbon footprint. It is the cleanest, the smallest carbon footprint molecule available. We should be able to, along with Australia, along with Canada, along with UAE, along with Qatar, the free world, Be able to provide access of that gas to practically every country in the nation, and it is affordable and economical where we don't have to burn coal. So good should not be…

AI assessment note: “That would be, that would be the immediate pathway, I would tell the president”

Q You mentioned John Doar, an incredible individual. You've had several incredible individuals be part of the journey. I read that there was an Andy Grove moment that really shaped your thinking on leadership. Can you tell me about that moment and how it shaped your leadership?

A Sure. Um, so, uh, I'm a technologist. I used to be a rocket scientist. So here I am starting a company. And when I started the company, if you had given me, if you had said P and L EBITDA, all those, you know, financial terms, I wouldn't even know what that meant. And I learned along the way. So here I am, I know how to build one off and really well, because that's what we did for the space missions. That's what we did in our university labs. So we built this one off, two off of the first bloom boxes that are out there working at Google, other places doing very well. After we built the first five, me and the engineer said, we can now hand it off to manufacturing and ask them to make it. And, uh, little did we know our engineering intent, our design intent, everything we knew Had to be written up in such elaborate terms in terms of manufacturing and instructions for somebody who is just a technician who does not know the engineering content, but will do exactly what they're being told to make these boxes. So here we build the next 10, the next 20. They're all going out in the, in the field and failing spectacularly. And it's a shock because in those early days, um, they're expensive first units. Reputation is on the line. So I go, this cannot scale. So I just stop production. I call my board and I say, I need help. I need people to come and help me, tell me how to do manufacturi…

AI assessment note: “one of the people that come is Andy Groh, who became a great friend”

Q We mentioned some of the big names in terms of the biggest companies of our day. Their focus on energy, Uh, acquiring energy supply is more important than ever. Are we seeing the hyperscalers secretly become energy companies in some ways?

A Here's what's interesting, right? We're manufacturing intelligence as we spoke about, and there's never been a more high value product manufactured with electricity than intelligence. So the input into the factory Unlike a chemical factory where all these raw materials, ores, other things come in and you process, the input into this factory Is simply electricity and data, and data is everywhere. So the only real cost input coming in is electricity. The machines are the chips. The output is intelligence. So this is the single largest input, and that input today is not abundant, right? So clearly electricity becomes The key factor. So herein, I see it slightly differently. I believe the fact that electricity became so important for this critical industry that knows how to move at speed and scale is going to mean that since Edison, almost 150 years later, we are going to create a new construct for electricity in the world that's more digital electricity as opposed to the mechanical age electricity, ok? And that digital electricity For many reasons I can walk you through, it's going to be more efficient, it's going to be cleaner, it's going to be more reliable, and then these large companies that have the resources To allow that kind of new electricity to happen at scale, it's going to trickle down to the masses everywhere. Sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh, to just use examples of…

AI assessment note: “these large companies that have the resources To allow that kind of new electricity to happen”

Q You mentioned John Doar, an incredible individual. You've had several incredible individuals be part of the journey. I read that there was an Andy Grove moment that really shaped your thinking on leadership. Can you tell me about that moment and how it shaped your leadership?

A Sure. Um, so, uh, I'm a technologist. I used to be a rocket scientist. So here I am starting a company. And when I started the company, if you had given me, if you had said P and L EBITDA, all those, you know, financial terms, I wouldn't even know what that meant. And I learned along the way. So here I am, I know how to build one off and really well, because that's what we did for the space missions. That's what we did in our university labs. So we built this one off, two off of the first bloom boxes that are out there working at Google, other places doing very well. After we built the first five, me and the engineer said, we can now hand it off to manufacturing and ask them to make it. And, uh, little did we know our engineering intent, our design intent, everything we knew Had to be written up in such elaborate terms in terms of manufacturing and instructions for somebody who is just a technician who does not know the engineering content, but will do exactly what they're being told to make these boxes. So here we build the next 10, the next 20. They're all going out in the, in the field and failing spectacularly. And it's a shock because in those early days, um, they're expensive first units. Reputation is on the line. So I go, this cannot scale. So I just stop production. I call my board and I say, I need help. I need people to come and help me, tell me how to do manufacturi…

AI assessment note: “one of the people that come is Andy Groh, who became a great friend”

Q What would you say to someone Who is struggling to get up? If you're advising your child, maybe, and there's a lot of people who've gone through layoffs, it's a tough time in tech for that, who is struggling to get up again.

A The really hard experiences are what shape you, what you're really made of. It's very easy to feel like you're a hero when everything is going well for you. These hard experiences, as hard as they may be, if you just learn from it and look forward, don't look in the rearview mirror. When you're driving, you're looking through the windshield. You're looking forward, ok? You just look in the rearview mirror only to learn. Not to play the bad movie again and again. You know, if, if that was a bad experience for you, it's like watching a bad movie. Why would you play the bad movie again in your mind? Which is what you do, right? It is so nonsensical. Learn from it. Look forward. Believe that tomorrow is always going to be better than today. And at a minimum, Life gets easier when you have that attitude.

AI assessment note: “These hard experiences, as hard as they may be, if you just learn from it”

Q We're both in slightly rarefied airs, um, in terms of, um, the events we go to, the people we spend time with. Candidly, I just see a smaller and smaller number of people make more and more money. Do you not see the same? And as sad as it is, I think AI is doing more to concentrate wealth than it is distribute it.

A I wouldn't disagree with you on the number of people, the, the fewer number of companies that are going to make An unbelievable amount of financial, um, success out of AI. However, there is no known methodology to raise all boats in the world than technology. Technology has been the best equalizer in the history of mankind. Just think about Infant mortality. Think about hunger. Think about clean water. Think about healthcare and the number of things you're able to cure. It is technology that's brought all that to most people in the world. There is probably no force in the world Other than technology that has done that to so many people at such large scale. Is there inequity between the best healthcare and the lowest healthcare? The answer is yes. But has the healthcare of every living person on the planet gotten a lot better than it was because of the technological advances? The answer is yes.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't disagree with you on the number of people”

Q kind of exactly like this, and you're like, God, I wasn't expecting that. We've seen Some suggestions that actually governments should own part of the largest AI companies to bring people with them. What do you think of that as an initiative? Is it like a normally nice marketing message, but carries no weight? Or is it actually meaningful for people to feel like they have ownership in these companies?

A Here's the thing about companies, tech, ownerships, right? The top 20 most important companies That list changes every 10 years in the US. It's so unlike the EU where practically new companies have rarely come up, come on and displaced existing old, old companies. I see the world more and more being not monopolized by single large companies. You know, Microsoft used to be considered a monopoly and everybody was afraid of it. No longer. Google was considered to be the monopoly. No longer. So I don't see regulation having to come in. The only thing regulation can do, in my opinion, is stop that innovative culture. So if, if the government took Major equity shares in a company, and because of that provided unfair access for those companies to its products and its people. By definition, they're stopping the startups who have better ideas to come and compete for it. I think free competition. Go back to the first question you asked me, winning and losing. You want to win, and if you want entrepreneurs to win, you have to give them at least a sense that they're playing in a level playing field.

AI assessment note: “if the government took Major equity shares in a company... they're stopping the startups”

Q You said before, speaking of that, about the ability to produce tens of gigawatts of power generation on the grid in a hurry. There's a quote. It's a pretty big claim. Like, how much can you actually deploy in a hurry? Like, speed to production. How do you think about that? And how possible is it? Because scaling production is everything. How do you think about that?

A Look, we have developed a technology which does not use the traditional power supply, supply chains. And the technologies we use are more akin to, uh, computer electronics and hardware, right? It's a solid state device that makes the electricity. So even at the tens of gigawatts, we will be single digit percentages Of the total supply chain that already exists to make other devices of similar nature. So when Steve Jobs comes and shows his first smartphone, nobody says, will you build, will you build 5000 of these or 10,000 of this next year? It's in the millions. And there's a supply chain that knows how to scale very fast. That's the supply chain we're going to rely on. And that didn't happen by accident. The company was built to light up the planet. That was the mission of the company. So everything we did in the company, including our manufacturing lines, were built for one day being able to scale and scale fast. Now we are just opening that chapter and executing to that. It's all about execution, and execution at that scale is not trivial. It's not easy. Just like I learned the very first time I had to build a, you know, like product with Antigro. So, but what I'm still here to talk about that story, which means we are good learners. We learn, we learn how to get up when we fall.

AI assessment note: “Even at the tens of gigawatts, we will be single digit percentages”

Q kind of exactly like this, and you're like, God, I wasn't expecting that. We've seen Some suggestions that actually governments should own part of the largest AI companies to bring people with them. What do you think of that as an initiative? Is it like a normally nice marketing message, but carries no weight? Or is it actually meaningful for people to feel like they have ownership in these companies?

A Here's the thing about companies, tech, ownerships, right? The top 20 most important companies That list changes every 10 years in the US. It's so unlike the EU where practically new companies have rarely come up, come on and displaced existing old, old companies. I see the world more and more being not monopolized by single large companies. You know, Microsoft used to be considered a monopoly and everybody was afraid of it. No longer. Google was considered to be the monopoly. No longer. So I don't see regulation having to come in. The only thing regulation can do, in my opinion, is stop that innovative culture. So if, if the government took Major equity shares in a company, and because of that provided unfair access for those companies to its products and its people. By definition, they're stopping the startups who have better ideas to come and compete for it. I think free competition. Go back to the first question you asked me, winning and losing. You want to win, and if you want entrepreneurs to win, you have to give them at least a sense that they're playing in a level playing field.

AI assessment note: “if the government took Major equity shares in a company... they're stopping the startups”

Q You said before, speaking of that, about the ability to produce tens of gigawatts of power generation on the grid in a hurry. There's a quote. It's a pretty big claim. Like, how much can you actually deploy in a hurry? Like, speed to production. How do you think about that? And how possible is it? Because scaling production is everything. How do you think about that?

A Look, we have developed a technology which does not use the traditional power supply, supply chains. And the technologies we use are more akin to, uh, computer electronics and hardware, right? It's a solid state device that makes the electricity. So even at the tens of gigawatts, we will be single digit percentages Of the total supply chain that already exists to make other devices of similar nature. So when Steve Jobs comes and shows his first smartphone, nobody says, will you build, will you build 5000 of these or 10,000 of this next year? It's in the millions. And there's a supply chain that knows how to scale very fast. That's the supply chain we're going to rely on. And that didn't happen by accident. The company was built to light up the planet. That was the mission of the company. So everything we did in the company, including our manufacturing lines, were built for one day being able to scale and scale fast. Now we are just opening that chapter and executing to that. It's all about execution, and execution at that scale is not trivial. It's not easy. Just like I learned the very first time I had to build a, you know, like product with Antigro. So, but what I'm still here to talk about that story, which means we are good learners. We learn, we learn how to get up when we fall.

AI assessment note: “we will be single digit percentages Of the total supply chain that already exists”

Q What would you say to someone Who is struggling to get up? If you're advising your child, maybe, and there's a lot of people who've gone through layoffs, it's a tough time in tech for that, who is struggling to get up again.

A The really hard experiences are what shape you, what you're really made of. It's very easy to feel like you're a hero when everything is going well for you. These hard experiences, as hard as they may be, if you just learn from it and look forward, don't look in the rearview mirror. When you're driving, you're looking through the windshield. You're looking forward, ok? You just look in the rearview mirror only to learn. Not to play the bad movie again and again. You know, if, if that was a bad experience for you, it's like watching a bad movie. Why would you play the bad movie again in your mind? Which is what you do, right? It is so nonsensical. Learn from it. Look forward. Believe that tomorrow is always going to be better than today. And at a minimum, Life gets easier when you have that attitude.

AI assessment note: “Learn from it. Look forward. Believe that tomorrow is always going to be better”

Q We mentioned some of the big names in terms of the biggest companies of our day. Their focus on energy, Uh, acquiring energy supply is more important than ever. Are we seeing the hyperscalers secretly become energy companies in some ways?

A Here's what's interesting, right? We're manufacturing intelligence as we spoke about, and there's never been a more high value product manufactured with electricity than intelligence. So the input into the factory Unlike a chemical factory where all these raw materials, ores, other things come in and you process, the input into this factory Is simply electricity and data, and data is everywhere. So the only real cost input coming in is electricity. The machines are the chips. The output is intelligence. So this is the single largest input, and that input today is not abundant, right? So clearly electricity becomes The key factor. So herein, I see it slightly differently. I believe the fact that electricity became so important for this critical industry that knows how to move at speed and scale is going to mean that since Edison, almost 150 years later, we are going to create a new construct for electricity in the world that's more digital electricity as opposed to the mechanical age electricity, ok? And that digital electricity For many reasons I can walk you through, it's going to be more efficient, it's going to be cleaner, it's going to be more reliable, and then these large companies that have the resources To allow that kind of new electricity to happen at scale, it's going to trickle down to the masses everywhere. Sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh, to just use examples of…

AI assessment note: “So herein, I see it slightly differently. I believe the fact that electricity became”

Q have, and I was watching some of your other interviews before this, and, you know, candidly, you said that AI-driven power demand is secular and enduring, and Kale, I have many great people on the show, and they talk about infrastructure bubbles, and, um, the inevitability of, kind of, falters, Are we in an AI infrastructure bubble when you look at it from your perspective, as blunt as that is?

A People confuse markets, stock prices, and infrastructure, and secular changes. The stock market is going to go through whatever it goes through. The, any revolution, and I would call AI absolutely a revolution, that's going It's, it's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick, right? Technology itself, digitization itself was on a hockey stick in terms of us going from the mechanical age infrastructure to the digital, you know, infrastructure. AI has come and put a hockey stick on that hockey stick. So that's what we're experiencing. Anything going at that speed, will it have bumps along the road? Will it have pauses along the way? Most probably, yes. You know, we don't know of anything else in human history of this scale and this magnitude, but it is the trajectory. Is the normal course after the course correction still going to be this phenomenal course? I absolutely believe so, because for the first time in human history, we are manufacturing intelligence. When was the last time any person anywhere in any civilization said, we have too much intelligence, let's stop. So I think, I think this is going to be Ubiquitous.

AI assessment note: “will it have bumps along the road? Will it have pauses along the way? Most probably, yes.”