Microsoft, every mention
100 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Shayle Kann 48Bilal Khashid 19Brian Janous 17Stephen Lacey 10Andreas Apley 7Laurent Bueneau 5Shanu Matthew 4Seyed Madaeni 4Jeremy Eliahu-Ontiveros 4Andy Lubershane 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
What comes after the data center backlash?
- ▶ 5:34 Brian Janous Microsoft probably has close to a gigawatt of data centers in Quincy Washington. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:45 Brian Janous Something we, we have to navigate as a, as an early stage developer that, you know, you wouldn't if you're Google or Microsoft.
- ▶ 35:08 Brian Janous We did this in, gosh, uh, it was probably twenty-sixteen at Microsoft. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:29 Brian Janous And Microsoft Research picked it up, and they're like, yeah, we should do that.
- ▶ 46:38 Shayle Kann Built much of before, but it was kind of the same thing fundamentally that you were doing at Microsoft, right?
Can AI revolutionize grid operations?
Inside the AI power wars
- ▶ 0:27 Shayle Kann You know about Google's CPUs, you know about Tranium coming from Amazon, you know what Microsoft and Meta are doing, you probably know about the partnerships NVIDIA has set up.
- ▶ 7:21 Shayle Kann No offense to my friends at Microsoft, who I think have been kind of second behind them. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:56 Jeremy Eliahu-Ontiveros And so increasingly, you, you basically look at Amazon or, or Microsoft, how many gigawatts they're building every quarter?
- ▶ 18:34 Jeremy Eliahu-Ontiveros Um, and then, you know, once they sort of find sites that they like, they can bring in partners, uh, whether it be Microsoft or Oracle or Cori and so on and so forth, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:21 Jeremy Eliahu-Ontiveros Uh, through the likes initially of Oracle, who really don't sell fuel, but now even the Metas of the world, the Microsoft of the world, they're essentially scaling through leasing.
How data centers are complicating transmission expansion
- ▶ 16:45 Maeve Allsup Like, for me, I think of the kind of kickoff of the AI frenzy as being that, was it November, December, twenty-twenty-two New York Times article where they, they're, you know, they're talking to the disastrous, um, Bing, chatbot, Sydney.
- ▶ 24:42 Shayle Kann Google or Meta or Microsoft or whoever it is, sign this ratepayer protection pledge.
The rise of flexible data centers
- ▶ 20:04 Varun Sivaram Microsoft has done a great job quantifying this.
Battery booms and the rise of flexibility [partner content]
- ▶ 26:54 Sean McAvoy And especially, like, you know, even the likes of, like, Meta and, you know, you have your Oracles of the World and your Microsofts and, you know, everyone else who are trying to build, build, build, build these out.
- ▶ 28:58 Sean McAvoy So it is the likes of, you know, the big hyperscalers or these big companies, like whether it's Nvidia, whether it's like Microsoft, whether it's Apple, et cetera.
AI scaling pathways: on grid, on edge, off grid, off planet
- ▶ 21:37 Shayle Kann That's, in some ways, it's sort of a legacy of the cloud business, where AWS and Azure, um, and, and Google basically promised in their SLAs to their customers that they would be able to offer really high uptime, and so they have this, you…
Will inference move to the edge?
- ▶ 6:08 Dr. Ben Lee The first is massive hyperscale data centers, the ones run by Microsoft and Google and Amazon, hundreds of thousands of machines, massive facilities.
Can AI revolutionize EPC?
- ▶ 23:50 Alex Modon You'll do almost all of your kind of rough engineering or hand calcs in Excel.
Who benefits from the AI power bottleneck?
- ▶ 7:51 Shanu Matthew The, um, you know, um, Microsoft's of the world, as well as including Meta, which is another hyperscaler, even though they don't have a legacy cloud business, um, that drives, you know, investment spend on GPUs, and that's kind of the… 4 times in the scene
Ag residue and carbon removal
- ▶ 28:24 Shayle Kann It's basically Microsoft, followed by, like, an order of magnitude lower frontier, which is the Stripe Coalition, followed by a bunch of little minnows, you know, in, in relative terms. 2 times in the scene
When to colocate data centers with generation
- ▶ 4:08 Shayle Kann He's the former head of energy at Microsoft, and he thinks about this stuff day in and day out.
Fresh intel from state utility regulatory filings
- ▶ 36:24 Nat Bullard Be like, we'll give you everything you want as long as you don't mind reading a landscape printed PDF of an Excel file that has been turned into 1500 JPEGs and uploaded in one go.
The state of play of data center development
- ▶ 6:28 Chris Sharp I want, I want people to go really comfortable with that is that a lot of these AI capabilities are being embedded in the cloud services you're consuming today, like Copilot and in some of the early capabilities coming to market, but…
Specialized AI brains for physical industry
- ▶ 6:25 Sam Smith-Eppsteiner They live in SharePoint, they live in email, they live in totally different kinds of documentation storage, and so this data is just inherently sort of fragmented and siloed.
How AI is solving real utility challenges [partner content]
- ▶ 0:28 unnamed speaker That's Laurent Bueneau, a power and utilities leader at Microsoft, talking with Stephen Lacey.
- ▶ 3:29 unnamed speaker In this episode, produced in partnership with Microsoft, Laurent Boineau talks with Steven Lacy about where AI can have the biggest impact.
- ▶ 4:30 Laurent Bueneau And with that in mind, yes, we have a generative AI for permitting solution, which customers can deploy on their Azure subscription, which allows teams to work together on permitting and permitting.
- ▶ 5:52 Laurent Bueneau Five co-pilot, for instance, uh, which is, uh, the, uh, general layer within the office suite.
- ▶ 6:43 Stephen Lacey Microsoft recently demonstrated that AI could screen tens of millions of candidates to discover new battery materials, and I'd like your thoughts on how AI is being used for scientific discovery to accelerate clean energy solutions and… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:32 Laurent Bueneau And they use, uh, a tool called, um, Security Copilot. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:09 unnamed speaker To learn more about how Microsoft is working with utilities and other energy companies to deploy AI to accelerate the energy transition, go to microsoft.com slash industry slash energy.
A skeptic’s take on AI electricity load growth
- ▶ 21:12 John Koomey Uh, because that was used, uh, by the head of Microsoft to explain why he thought that demand would not be affected.
- ▶ 45:43 John Koomey Like, you start to see, like, Microsoft, I think, started canceling some of their leases and other things like that, planned leases.
More 2025 trends: DeepSeek, plug-in hybrids, and curtailment
- ▶ 24:39 Nat Bullard I never imagined that the CEO of Microsoft would reference the Jevons paradox, but he did.
Making DERs work for load growth
- ▶ 33:34 Pierre Lafarge Um, Microsoft famously contracted, uh, for the power from a resurrected Three Mile Island, right, through with Constellation.
Scaling low-carbon products with book and claim systems
- ▶ 0:17 Adam Klauber So aviation, even if there's tremendous uptake, a company like Microsoft who wants to get to net zero by 2030 simply will not be able to do this without book and claim.
- ▶ 35:26 Adam Klauber Even if there's tremendous uptake, a, a company like Microsoft who wants to get to net zero by 2030 simply will not be able to do this without Book and Claim.
How cyber attacks could threaten the energy transition [partner content]
- ▶ 0:33 Stephen Lacey Bilal Khashid is the executive director of Microsoft's global power and utilities business. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:01 Bilal Khashid And our own research here at Microsoft shows that, uh, we've seen a 40% increase in state-sponsored attacks on critical infrastructure, and the energy sector is high on that list.
- ▶ 14:39 Bilal Khashid When I look at Microsoft specifically, I continually get impressed with how much we are doing to drive cybersecurity forward and the investments that we are putting in, uh, to build those new capabilities. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:06 Bilal Khashid Things like Microsoft Security Co-Pilot, for example. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:25 Bilal Khashid And then you can also look at how our, you know, Security Co-Pilot and Microsoft Sentinel, for example, um,
- ▶ 17:11 Bilal Khashid Uh, one that I feel is cutting edge and kind of industry leading, leveraging generative AI components, leveraging co-pilot for Microsoft three 65 across our entire workforce, which, you know, is a significant milestone in their digital… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:53 Bilal Khashid And I feel like that's kind of what we're building now at Microsoft, uh, to take these concepts further with AI and predictive analytics advancing to a point, uh, that seemed purely fictional just a few decades ago, but it's a major trend… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:22 Bilal Khashid And, you know, our investments in AI specifically, like Security Co-Pilot, I mean, this is what allows security teams to analyze huge amounts of global threat data in real time, spotting those patterns, those vulnerabilities that humans…
- ▶ 19:43 Bilal Khashid And, you know, our Microsoft research team is actively exploring how quantum technologies could both enhance encryption and create
- ▶ 21:25 Bilal Khashid Around more sophisticated AI threat detection, uh, tools that some of the incredible, uh, security stack that Microsoft brings to market as well, the investments that we're seeing in R&D. 4 times in the scene
Explaining the 'Watt-Bit Spread'
- ▶ 4:14 Shayle Kann Brian is, of course, the co-founder of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which develops power-ready sites for large loads like data centers, but he previously spent over a decade as the VP of Energy at Microsoft.
- ▶ 5:25 Brian Janous Yeah, I mean, I, I remember when I first joined Microsoft, and, uh, it was actually right about this time, 2011, um, it, it still wasn't even clear to me why that job existed. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:06 Brian Janous Like, no one's going to ever think about it that much.
- ▶ 7:37 Brian Janous Um, cause I mean, keep in mind, like Microsoft and Meta, you know, they're not Equinix, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:49 Brian Janous That makes demand planning pretty tricky, because even if you have extraordinarily high conviction, as we did in the early twenty-tens, that the cloud market was going to be very large, we did not have incredible conviction on exactly what…
- ▶ 13:30 Shayle Kann Yeah, you and I have talked about this before, so correct me where I've gotten how you've explained this to me wrong, but my recollection is that in the, in previous waves here, the way that this market was mostly structured was either,…
The complex path to market for low-carbon cement
- ▶ 13:07 Leah Ellis So we, you know, work with Microsoft. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:50 Shayle Kann The end of your value chain is somebody like Microsoft who owns a building and has really serious decarbonization goals, but there are, whatever you said, three or four parties in the mix in between. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:22 Shayle Kann Book and claim, of course, being, you talked about, so Microsoft, the announcement that you guys made with Microsoft is Microsoft buying environmental attributes, right? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:06 Shayle Kann So just to wrap up on the demand side and where you see this market heading, I mean, you, you've talked about Microsoft, you mentioned Amazon. 2 times in the scene
DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale
- ▶ 20:47 Andreas Apley That's Microsoft. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:51 Andreas Apley And then finally on the finance ability of it, a lot of the intermediaries today in the market, they don't have the balance sheet of a Microsoft or JP Morgan.
The better mousetrap fallacy
- ▶ 34:45 Andy Lubershane You know, there's basically one big buyer in the market, which is Microsoft, and then a long tail of, of smaller buyers, and so I worry that the, the race to develop mousetraps in DAC is maybe just 10 years too early, and maybe that's not… 3 times in the scene
Can chip efficiency slow AI's energy demand?
- ▶ 4:48 Shayle Kann Christian has an extremely long tenure in data center world to the point where if you know the term PUE, power use effectiveness, which people use to measure the energy efficiency of data centers, Christian came up with that term, but also…
- ▶ 29:16 Christian Belady I, I, if you look, you know, I ran an R and D team in my last five years at Microsoft.
- ▶ 33:34 Christian Belady Take a look at the fact back in 2016, um, at Microsoft, we did this project at Cheyenne, which actually looked at, um, using the reserve power because there was this whole notion of that we were going to be adding a 180 megawatts of…
- ▶ 42:12 Christian Belady And to Microsoft's credit, we did implement this where the data centers are being looked at to try to see how can we change the design so that we increase pollinators and habitat for pollinators so the fields around it get, have healthier…
- ▶ 44:22 Shayle Kann Christian Beledi is an advisor to a variety of companies in and around the data center world, and was most recently vice president and distinguished engineer at Microsoft, focused on data center advanced development.
Under the hood of data center power demand
- ▶ 4:05 Shayle Kann Brian spent about 12 years running energy for Microsoft, so he was there long before any of this current wave of AI energy demand showed up, but he was also there at the beginning when it did.
- ▶ 4:42 Shayle Kann So you spent, how long were you at Microsoft in the end? 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:51 Brian Janous So if you go on to AWS, you go on to Azure, and you say, I want to stand up an application, you're going to have an option to, to select a region, and it'll be called US East or US West too.
- ▶ 10:37 Brian Janous Everyone was launching some of their early cloud regions, and then over time, you know, Microsoft, Amazon, Google all have dozens of regions around the world, but that dozens of regions consists of hundreds of individual data centers.
- ▶ 29:00 Brian Janous I still remember my very first day at Microsoft.
- ▶ 35:50 Shayle Kann And, you know, we saw this a couple weeks ago, Microsoft announced that, uh, despite all their best efforts, they're 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 39:51 Shayle Kann And by the way, decarbonization, or like, access to clean power at that site, and then ideally access to twenty-four-seven clean power at that site, right, which is the, the goal that the hyperscalers have set for themselves, or at least I…
- ▶ 42:32 Shayle Kann Brian Janis is the co-founder of Cloverleaf Infrastructure and the former VP of Energy at Microsoft.
The news quiz episode!
- ▶ 9:19 Stephen Lacey Uh, according to a leaked document from Business Insider, Microsoft is expanding data center capacity dramatically. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 42:05 Matt Eggers Yeah, um, Microsoft.
The electricity gauntlet has arrived
- ▶ 41:40 Andy Lubershane You know, no surprise, it's been publicly reported that Microsoft has hired a, a head of, of nuclear.
The challenges of building a carbon removal portfolio
- ▶ 3:25 Shayle Kann Microsoft and Shopify.
The Volts crossover episode
- ▶ 30:12 David Roberts You had this weird announcement from Microsoft the other day. 3 times in the scene
How is U.S. industrial policy affecting actual climatetech investment?
- ▶ 0:09 Stephen Lacey You've been hearing me talk about it a lot, and I won't be talking about it much longer because we're only one week out from the event, and that means you only have one week to get a ticket and network with attendees from Microsoft, AES,…
Climate tech startups need strong techno-economic analysis (TEA)
- ▶ 0:27 unnamed speaker Microsoft, GE Digital, AES, National Grid, Oracle, and a bunch of founders, executives, and academics who are building AI strategies right now.
Reviving the stagnant plant based meat market
- ▶ 0:14 Stephen Lacey It's going to feature experts from Microsoft, GE Digital, AES, National Grid, Oracle, and a wide range of founders, executives, and academics who are building AI strategies right now.
Fixing interconnection
- ▶ 1:23 Stephen Lacey It'll feature top experts from Microsoft, GE Digital, AES, National Grid, Oracle, and a wide range of founders, executives, and academics who are building AI strategies right now.
Stopping geoengineering, by accident
- ▶ 1:23 Stephen Lacey It'll feature top experts from Microsoft, GE Digital, AES, National Grid, Oracle, and a wide range of founders, executives, and academics who are building AI strategies right now.
The food-energy nexus
- ▶ 0:43 unnamed speaker It's going to feature top experts from Microsoft, GE Digital, AES, National Grid, Oracle, and a range of founders, executives, and academics who are building AI strategies right now.
AI for climate: a real world test
- ▶ 10:53 Seyed Madaeni Um, traditionally a lot of trading shops who have used, you know, status quo and Excel spreadsheets really, um, are lagging behind utilizing technology. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 52:11 Seyed Madaeni Now, realizing we're not doing insulated services, the problem if it's just charge and discharge, you can probably do it in Excel.
- ▶ 59:12 Seyed Madaeni To generate what Duncan, again, the big caveat is you can do all of this in, in Excel because the problem has been simplified.
- ▶ 1:11:29 Duncan Campbell Energy industry is full of people who are like great at Excel and really good at systems thinking, but are not programmers.
The carbon market’s quality problem
- ▶ 21:07 Shayle Kann And seeing the purchases that, like, Stripe is making, and Microsoft is making, things like that, where they're paying, you know, there's a, there's a, Frontier Fund just made a, a big purchase from, uh, Charm Industrial, which is for, for…
More 2023 trends: EVs, onshoring, and the three ages of decarbonization
- ▶ 42:52 Shayle Kann I mean, I don't, I don't think anybody's saying full net zero, besides maybe, like, Microsoft, who's going to not only go net zero, but then, like, remove all of their historical emissions.
Advance market commitments to decarbonize heavy industry
- ▶ 16:29 Varun Sivaram Alphabet, Microsoft, and Salesforce is almost exactly as how Frontier has done it.
Crossing the valley of death
- ▶ 14:20 Scott Jacobs It's a lot more than just the box checking exercise or the Excel spreadsheet jockeying that you do in a typical finance organization.
Will this carbon market boom be different?
- ▶ 22:36 Shayle Kann On the other hand, you've got the high-quality, long-term, durable carbon removal stuff, direct air capture, mineralization, a bunch of other stuff like that, where currently the purchases that are getting made by Stripe and Shopify and…
- ▶ 43:55 Shayle Kann Not to get into Microsoft Excel territory, though I know you'll appreciate this.
Quantum computing could be a critical climate solution
- ▶ 14:31 unnamed speaker You've got sort of the, the big companies that are going after this, and so this is IBM, Honeywell, Google, Microsoft, um, uh, to, to name a few.
- ▶ 22:33 Mark Cupta It is the Amazons, it's the Microsoft, it's the Googles.
A bumpy ride toward decarbonizing aviation
- ▶ 6:59 Shayle Kann Uh, Microsoft are the ones buying all the carbon removal credits.
Kickstarting a $1 trillion market for carbon removal
- ▶ 3:57 Shayle Kann Stripe, which has been leading the charge alongside, I would say, Microsoft and Shopify, publishes all the applications it receives, along with the details of what it's selected,
- ▶ 19:49 Nan Ransohoff Like, even with the recent progress, even with all these companies that we're finding and funding and all the press and, um, and, you know, Stripe purchases and Microsoft purchases, like, we are still so far off target, um, and it's a…