Power

“The second largest user of water in the world behind agriculture is power.”

“No, I don't think when you have power, that's the first biggest responsibility you have is to not show the power.”

“And understanding the multiple factors that drive failure of new transmission, I think, is key to understanding why power is, in my opinion, The rate limiter to AI growth, and why upward pressure on electricity prices will probably sustain for a while.”

“I think the biggest problem is actually in power.”

“That power has a consequence. It creates resistance. People naturally become a little bit reluctant, if not totally defensive, to things that come at them from power.”

“On power, we have a commitment that we are going to pay our own way to not drive up energy prices for people.”

“And that at a simple level is, is the data centers and the power that supports them. And that is the largest and fastest growing investment theme at Brookfield.”

“Power is less than 10% of the cost of the cluster. Right? So, so like, it's that 90% you're not saving anything on.”

“I thought these power lists that they developed in the entertainment business were just sheer nonsense because there's no such thing as power. It doesn't exist. And when people would say this one's the second most or the 10th most or you're the most powerful, …”

“There's plenty of space. There appear to be plenty of chips but there isn't enough power.”

“I would say that the single biggest challenge that we face when it comes to the trend in AI is power.”

“Yeah, and even if the bottleneck within the infrastructure moves, so if it becomes power, if it becomes cooling or anything else, then you'll have a chip glut for sure, yeah.”

“And then you have to look back and say, where is AI constrained? Right now. It's constrained in power, it's constrained on compute, it's constrained on the net, on the network.”

“Like for me, my power is 10 X more expensive between the hours of four and nine PM. So we don't run the washing machine.”

“In data centers, the constraints now are, you know, a year ago was much more around GPUs and certain pieces of equipment inside the data center stack, and now the primary constraints are really more power and skilled labor.”

“First principle of real power is don't join other people's networks. Create your own and be the one everything flows through.”

“In the meantime, what we do know is that there are constraints and what those constraints are shifting. Obviously they started on the semi side. Now it's more on the power side.”

“I am aware of about 20 gigawatts of power that people want to make available for data centers now. Right now there's about 15 gigawatts of data centers worldwide, so more than double the current capacity.”

“That power will become a hard bottleneck in three to four years.”

“To stand up two billion or two million GPUs in 2026, you need about 2.7 gigs, gigawatts of power, right?”

“I am power, yes. I am not chip supply constrained. We were definitely constrained in 24. What we have told the street is that's why we are optimistic about sort of, ah, the first half of 25, which is the rest of our fiscal year.”

“And so not to mention the fact that the ability to acquire and collect those electrons then in some ways creates a moat against other folks that would want to try to do the same thing. So the more electrons That you can get a hold of, especially in the AI worl…”

“Power is the main constraint right now.”

“Usually when you're investing in farmland, you're not actually buying the land. What you're really buying is access to water. It's more about water than it is soil. And so data centers is the same thing. It's about access to power.”

“Power is the primitive for AI, and that's why China is heads down in this race, and they're taking our technology, right, and they're, you know, they're improving it”

“I see people with hammers hitting other people on the head. That does not mean that a hammer is not a useful tool. You can take a screwdriver and stab it into somebody's belly. I have a very dear friend who we'll probably talk about later in the podcast. Laura…”

“Life is not homeostatic at all. That life is actually self-fulfillment. If I believe you're powerful, you will become more powerful. If I believe you have no power, you will wind up with almost no power. And that therefore, it is all forgotten and forgiven.”

“There's plenty of power most of the time. There's, you know, a number of hours a year where we don't have enough power, and so that's really what we're trying to solve for.”

“Even before you have product market fit, It's worth thinking about strategy. Now it's not strategy in the sense of sort of this fully articulated strategic planning. We're going to do this. These are going to be the competitors. This is going to, how we're goi…”

“There are this incredible, I mean, business is really hard, right? And there are just a multitude of things you have to pay attention for. I'm right because all those things fall into those three categories. So it's an exhaustive set, and it's just, it's, it s…”

“You know, the interesting thing about AI is, in the end, it's going to be limited by things like power. You know, if you're, and, you know, chips, and if you're trying to build these really massive clusters in 10 years or whatever.”

“Any CEO worth their salt is starved for argument and debate. So I'm not incredibly surprised by Schmidt's response, because one of the big problems with power is that most people won't argue with you if you're in a powerful position.”

“I think there is a natural tendency towards those in power to consolidate that power. And I think the internet provided a really effective means to consolidate power on a scale not seen before.”

“There are really two major step changes in the value of a company. The first is product market fit, and the second is getting power. And they're quite distinct and involve different things.”

“Network effects describes only the value creation, and it's a statement without consideration about competition, which the latter is all power is about. So regardless of how we end up defining network economies, it is the type of platform that we believe has p…”

“So flywheels are a sign of product market fit. And tell you absolutely nothing about power.”

“So the value comes from matching a buyer and a seller, but power in these things is really different. It comes from one platform doing this materially better than another platform, And that the thing that drives that difference in performance is sustainable. T…”

“By keeping the power, we also have the excuse that somebody didn't execute properly, you know, like, you know, so we have, not only do we have this story in the narrative of how important we are on one hand, we also have the story in the narrative where when t…”

“The fascinating thing people don't realize is that after the cost of the physical servers themselves, The second biggest cost in a large data center is power.”

“Power is incredibly disruptive, and you have to be very wary of it and try super hard not ever to have to use it.”

“It isn't that women don't like power at all, but that we think of it differently. So many of the very, very successful women I interviewed for that book, and for my second book, which is about the rise of female entrepreneurship, women on top, Thought of power…”

“Once you feel powerful... You lose all the social skills that got you power in the first place, you know, and, you know, we show when I feel powerful, I read people's emotions less effectively, I interrupt them more, And then all hell breaks loose, and you kno…”

“The connectivity in our homes is now just as important as our running water and our power”