Energy

“Energy is a pretty small share of the total cost of goods sold for that That data center, right? It's something like five to 10% of the total cost.”

“So if you look at areas that are obviously very interesting right now, because everybody needs improvement there, the big ones to everybody are semi and energy, and those are precisely right in our wheelhouse.”

“People look at data centers and say, oh, it's a big Costco box, and there's two parking, two cars in the parking lot, and all of that is being driven automatically, so there's no jobs. I call BS on that because if you think about whether it's around energy, Li…”

“I know that nuclear fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. Somebody will do that.”

“When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-autonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.”

“If energy is what you need for compute and is the bottleneck, And there's unlimited demand for intelligence. Then it stands to reason that if we have a lot less energy, then we will have a lot less intelligence or a lot less tokens or a lot more expensive toke…”

“And the reason tech has been so successful so quickly and has had so much human impact is because it's been lightly regulated. And I think it's better to keep it that way than not, and we'll lose optimism, we'll lose momentum, we'll lose progress, and that's w…”

“At the end of the day, tokens represent capacity and we're very constrained on capacity. We don't have enough energy. We don't have enough data centers and the demand is, is exponential. And so if I think about it from that angle, I think actually token costs …”

“We can't win the AI race without energy”

“What you're seeing in the headlines today is basically, Hey, AI is all that matters. Maybe defense matters because the world is becoming a slightly more volatile place, and energy matters as a derivative of AI. So if you're not already super exposed to those i…”

“Today in that, in Jensen's five layer cake of AI. The profits. They're accruing to energy. They're accruing to data centers. They're accruing to chips. They're accruing to models. Not really accruing to the applications.”

“And that's why we're doing deals around the world on energy, on minerals, and on infrastructure, and it's incredibly exciting about the progress we've made.”

“India's growing at, say, seven percent or six percent, it will continue to do so for a period of time. GDP per capita will go up, so consumer will do well energy will do well, energy consumption goes up as GDP per capita goes up, maybe above 5000 dollars.”

“Actually this, it's going to be energy and memory. Energy and memory is where the money is made.”

“As you're pointing out, you're going from systems that aren't just writing essays, not just writing software, but to literally generating matter. And I think it has pretty profound implications to semiconductors, airspace, energy.”

“They're going to have access to lower cost energy. Like there there's like under no metric, whether it's number of solar panels, number of nuclear power plants, like they are going to have the cheaper energy based on how things are going right now.”

“This is basically all gonna back to energy at some level. There's not gonna be that very much margin in it. And like, low cost intelligence production is going to be the key.”

“The, you know, the original narrative was someone would get to AGI and then that would be the end of the game is not how this is playing out. Everyone's gonna get to the same shit. It's all commodity. It's all getting a price to the cost of energy. And it's al…”

“Even the most deluded AI believer doesn't think that they're going to take over fintech and doesn't take over, they're going to take over energy. So I agree. You can, let me be clear, you can invest comfortably in those two areas and not have to spend a ton of…”

“It goes back and forth. Right now, again, it's chips.”

“That's representing at least a couple percent of GDP growth right now. That's driving massive investment in infrastructure and chip manufacturing and energy and all of these things.”

“We're at a point in time where computing is, is, is bound by energy at the global level, which just was never true in all of humanity.”

“There's three layers of the stack that fundamentally are going to matter. It's energy, it's compute, and it's the intelligence built on top.”

“So all of these upstream strategic industries like telecommunications airlines energy, essentially these are always organized by three giant state-owned companies that control pretty much the entire state of the business.”

“The countries that control compute will control AI, and you cannot have compute without energy.”

“I think more broadly than compute, there is physical constraints of, well, energy, but also like, you know, at some point, not too far, like robotics will become a major focus. And so so I think thinking about like the physical constraints is, is, is going to …”

“The race in AI, the thing that I'm very focused on learning about, and we're early in our thinking is, in order to get AI right, you have to get energy right.”

“I think it's actually something you can teach yourself. Like it's an acquired taste. I think many things in life are that way. They're path dependent. You just decide to have energy.”

“Energy, in my opinion, is not a climate change issue. Energy is a national security issue.”

“I actually think the world gets worse in the near term because energy will become the fundamental limiter, which means we will frack more. We'll pull more from the ocean because nuclear fission and fusion will still take time to build. You can't build solar pa…”

“If you think about what's happening over the next hundred years in manufacturing and reindustrialization, we're essentially taking what was an extremely labor heavy industry into being an energy heavy industry, right?”

“Energy, which I still think is the biggest unsolved issue right now in America, besides the federal deficit and the debt problem.”

“I cannot recall ever thinking until like after starting OpenAI that they were going to be so obviously related. That, you know, the, that energy would be the eventually the fundamental limiter on how much intelligence we could have.”

“Fundamental energy is the currency of AI. If you have energy, then I think a lot of other things may still be solved later.”

“I think energy and access to energy is sort of the defining question at that point. Like everything else you could solve, like, and everything else you could sort of either, you know, if it's in the realm of science and engineering, like, you know, in theory, …”

“And they know that as hard as it is to build a business in digital media, it's still harder to build one in robotics or life sciences or energy in what we call the world of atoms.”

“What is ultimately the number, the, probably the two limiting factor today is talent. And energy. That's it.”

“I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.”

“Energy is, like, clearly the next thing, and it's been a little bit of a champagne or a cocktail position in the sense that people talk about it at cocktail parties. Oh, energy's gonna be really important. Sam Altman's investing in it, but the market hasn't re…”

“My vision is we're going to see a lot of Teslas and SpaceX and NVIDIA is being built across those physical industries like energy, supply chain, defense, et cetera.”

“I don't think energy is a limiting factor in our ability to innovate. I don't think it is today... We're still rate limited by innovation and just raw intellectual horsepower and capability.”

“Anytime something's overcapitalized, you're likely to lose your shirt. Just because a market is growing doesn't mean you're making money. That's a really hard thing for people to grasp in energy.”

“There's this concept of half cycle. How much does it cost to just do a project? And then there's the full cycle. What do I have to pay to get access to that project? And that's where a lot of people lose in energy.”

“They're completely dependent on the Russians and they're actually de-industrializing. Like there are plants, you know, there are large German manufacturers who are shutting down right now because they literally Can I get energy?”

“It is very straightforward to take a model and say, parse through all of these documents and find second order derivative bets and say, oh, it turns out that energy is like very, very adjacent to investments in AI and may not be priced in the same way that GPU…”

“Energy is very likely to go to new companies, particularly in the area of nuclear.”

“I think compute will be less of a bottleneck than energy.”

“The key constraint with energy is not necessarily, is there enough energy in the world, but more so for training, is there enough energy in one place?”

“Time has no value, has no valence, has no force until time intersects with energy.”

“To me, wealth is nothing but storage of energy. And therefore the reason wealth is not zero sum because energy is, and we are just finding all ways to convert energy in our advantage.”

“So I think by and large, you know, we're looking for sure on AI and then I think probably also in energy, we're probably looking at a primarily a bipolar world for quite a while.”

“We've tracked transportation accounting for 15% of total emissions. As per the IPCC 2019 report, but receiving 30% of venture and growth investment since 2020. Whereas on the other hand, you know, energy deals, or energy investment made up 22% of overall fundi…”

“We will need to produce five times more energy than we make on Earth today by the end of the century”

“It looks like we'll spend more energy to overcome the consequences of climate change, to make up for the lost productivity, or to store the food and the crops.”

“I think there's every reason to believe that in the long run, energy is going to be cheaper for people than it is today, certainly as a proportion of income.”

“YC was mostly funding software companies, but I had a lot of conviction that we could apply the same thing that made YC work so well for software companies to companies in a lot of the areas that I cared about. AI, synthetic biology, energy.”

“I have generally been a bit more skeptical than most, I think, that it would change, fundamentally change at least, the things that I spend my professional time on, which is to say climate tech and energy.”

“Like you find 1.2% of the Fortune 100 board knows anything about energy.”

“Today it takes 30 units of energy to make a unit of beef. Ok, so if you measure beef in terms of calories, to make one calorie of beef takes about 30 calories of energy across the whole system.”

“If you're an adventure guy or woman, and you're trying to get a 10 X, Get the hell out of media. Go to healthcare, or go to energy, or technology places that you're much more likely to get that kind of return.”