# AI Power Demand & Edge Energy Infrastructure

**Podcast:** The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
**Published:** 2026-06-29

## Transcript

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.
Any revolution, and I would call AI absolutely a revolution, it's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick.
Clearly, electricity becomes the key factor.
We believe bringing power to the edge has to happen.
Electricity in the world is a $5.5 trillion market.
Last year, our revenues were $2 billion.
When power is democratized, access is not restricted by people who are in power.
And that's true democracy.
I would say don't short the U.S., don't short Silicon Valley.
This is 20VC.
Today, the largest position in Leo Aschenbrenner's fund, which makes up 16% of his fund, is in the hot seat, baby.
KR Shridhar, founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, joins us in the studio.
Now, KR's journey is wild.
Former NASA rocket scientist who worked on Mars missions before founding the energy company that is Bloom, 25 years building a company he never once doubted would work.
My word, that is a desert to go through.
Today, the market cap...
is approximately $93 billion, up over 1,500% in a single year.
Revenue hit $2 billion in 2025, up 37% year-on-year, driven almost entirely by, yep, you guessed it, the AI data center demand.
This was a really special show for me to do.
Having been a fan of Leo Ashenbrenner's for a long time, I now see why he's so all-in on Bloom Energy.
But before we dive into the show today...
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What's one thing in business that's spreading as fast as AI?
AI risk.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
KR, I'm so excited for this.
I am like the biggest fan of the company and the story.
So it's such a pleasure to have you here in person.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a great honor to be here.
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?
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 going to 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.
Bad things can happen.
You can fall down.
Falling down is not what I'm concerned about.
It's about the getting up.
What would you say to someone who is struggling to get up?
If you're advising your child, maybe 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?
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.
You just look in the rearview mirror only to learn not to play the bad movie again and again.
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?
Learn from it.
look forward, believe that tomorrow is always going to be better than today.
At a minimum, life gets easier when you have that attitude.
You have the most calming presence.
Seriously, I've almost ever interviewed, which is astonishing.
I've done 3,000 interviews.
When you say look forward, tomorrow is kind of better than today.
The interesting thing with this business is it's 25 years old.
It's become a darling in the last two years, whatever we want to call that time frame.
Did you always know?
this time was going to happen?
Or respectfully, was it a market moving in directions we couldn't anticipate?
If you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center.
It puts out a bloom box, powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling for the data center, and it being connected to nothing else.
What we are doing today The reason it's becoming the darling is those data centers are finally waking up and saying, this is the right solution for us.
For me, the period between 2001 and now, the 25 years, was never a question of if.
It was a question of when and how soon.
Did you ever doubt it?
I mean, 25 years is astonishing, K.R.
There was not a single night I went home and worried about the company surviving or doing well or whether I had made a mistake jumping into this field.
There were several days, there were several times where the company had existential threats to it that we had to overcome.
But in my mind, again, failure was never an option.
So I really never once worried about when we wake up tomorrow morning, are we going to be better off than we were the previous day?
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?
Sure.
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&L, EBITDA, all those 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.
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 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 field and failing spectacularly.
It's a shock because in those early days, 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 manufacturing.
I don't know.
One of the people that come is Andy Groh, who became a great friend and a mentor and a valley legend.
And then there are some other manufacturing gurus.
One of them was on my board.
So we were asked to compile all the data we had.
So we have three ring binders after three ring binders.
Now we are talking about the time when we still used paper for everything, right?
So we had them all packed.
We had an entire executive team sitting on one side of a large boardroom.
These great advisors sitting on the other side, including Andy Groh.
And we had dinner ordered, and we had all these stacks.
We were thinking we're going to stay up all night until we get to solving the problem.
So we all sit down, and as soon as we start talking, I don't know that we finish the first sentence.
And he says, can you stop for a minute?
And he says, can everybody else in the room leave from the executive team other than KR?
And so I have this group of illuminaries sitting on the other side, and me sitting on this side, it almost looks like a firing squad.
And then Andy says, what's wrong?
So I begin to explain what I think may be wrong.
He says, no, no, no, stop.
What's wrong?
I say something else thinking that I didn't get through to him properly.
And after the third time, he's like, KR, just leans over and he says, I want to know what's wrong with you.
And it shocks me.
It just shocks me for a moment.
I sit back and I go, I'm trying to build a great device that's going to be beneficial to people.
I don't know what's wrong with me.
And he says, you're such a smart guy.
You built this technology that's just absolutely amazing.
If you walk the floors.
and talk to the people out there, they are going to tell you why it's not working because they don't understand what they're building.
Have you talked to people and have they told you what they don't know?
It dawns on me that I've never done that.
Then he says, I know all these other guys want to go through those three-ring binders.
None of us know your product better than you.
If you're smart enough to design it, you'll be smart enough to figure it out.
Don't waste your time listening to everybody else and me.
Go figure it out.
That was the best piece of advice I ever got.
What do you take from that walk the floor?
It's like proximity to customers.
It's proximity to team.
How did that shape how you think about your go forward mindset?
Great question.
So this is not just about the shop floor.
What Andy Groh was teaching you was 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 in 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.
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.
I love that.
And I love the humanity.
Again, it's an amazing, calming presence that you have.
I was watching some of your other interviews before this.
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 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?
People confuse markets, stock prices, and infrastructure and secular changes.
The stock market is going to go through whatever it goes through.
Any revolution, and I would call AI absolutely a revolution, it's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick.
Technology itself, digitization itself, wasn't a hockey stick in terms of us going from the mechanical age infrastructure to the digital age 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.
We don't know of anything else in human history of this scale and this magnitude.
But is the trajectory, is the normal course after the course correction still going to be this phenomenal course?
I absolutely believe so.
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?
Never.
So I think this is going to be ubiquitous.
When intelligence becomes ubiquitous and abundant, which was the scarce resource, what becomes the valuable asset if intelligence is ubiquitous and abundant?
Wisdom.
You know, AI is not going to give you wisdom.
AI is not going to give you happiness.
AI is not going to give you empathy to relate to people the way you need to.
At the end of the day, a bot giving you counseling is not going to be the same as you and me sitting here talking to each other, looking at each other, understanding the facial expressions, relating to one another.
So humans are social animals.
When you look at what you do today, what's the single biggest bottleneck that you face most consistently?
The single biggest bottleneck...
in terms of introducing a new concept into society is the friction associated with new ideas.
On a big macro scale, it is for good reasons, very large infrastructure in the world has been designed and regulated to move slowly.
And we are entering an age where that huge amount of regulation that intentionally creates friction in the process, which was beneficial in the past, becomes an impediment.
to our growth and i'm particularly sensitive that i'm here in the european continent you specialize yes yeah absolutely absolutely i mean you get a plus for we had to get a permit to come up the stairs actually um it took a while yeah gavin baker who's obviously a very pronounced you know sort leader in the space and brilliant ambassador did articulate though that kind of permitting and the regulatory challenges around it actually has almost helped because it throttled supply to allow it to grow in lockstep.
And if we had unlimited supply straight away, it would actually create more problems.
Do you agree with that?
Or do you think it actually just continues to be an inhibitor?
Look, in an asymmetric world where not every player views regulation and growth at that level, I don't think I would agree with him.
If there was a global phenomenon and everybody on the planet agreed that we will throttle and move at a particular speed, that's a different story.
But that's utopia.
That never happens.
So being left behind because a particular country, a particular geography throttled it, when somebody moved at breakneck speed becomes a real detriment to the region that throttled it.
Is there a chance that the US will be left behind because of the regulatory permitting provisions that are in place when viewed in context against Asia or China in particular, where they have amazing model development and the permitting and regulatory environment is honestly not inhibiting them at all?
I think if everything else were equal, what you're saying would absolutely be true.
But the creative prowess, the innovative entrepreneurial...
spirit that you see in the United States is still a major trump card that the US has over any other place in the world today.
And I would say that human spirit is going to be able to overcome whatever other obstacles we have.
I would say don't short the US, don't short Silicon Valley.
It's never a good idea.
Never a good idea.
It's not paid well.
What will be a very pronounced bottleneck in five years time that we're not really talking about today?
I think that societally, globally, I would say the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind to some level of parity.
You know, there'll always be gaps, but what's happening for the first time in human history, right?
It's not even in technology history.
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 five years from now, the need to bring that level of access and affordability is going to be super important.
We're both in slightly rarefied areas in terms of...
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.
You know, I wouldn't disagree with you on the number of people, the fewer number of companies that are going to make an unbelievable amount of financial 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 health care and the number of things we'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.
I agree.
And so the bottleneck is then bringing people along and stopping them feeling like they are an isolated majority who are now not part of the revolution.
I think you're...
touching on something super important, which is abundance.
If you just think about the previous revolution we had, which is the mechanical age, industrial age revolution, it was still, for the most part, a fixed pie.
And in that fixed pie, if you got a bigger slice of it, I got a smaller slice of it.
So it was a zero-sum game.
When you create abundance, like the intelligence abundance we're talking about, abundance just changes the entire framing.
You getting a larger piece of the pie is not coming at my expense.
We just have to include all the people.
Can I ask an interesting one that I actually got asked on TV the other day, and I'm slightly...
taken about by asking, I wasn't expecting, you know, when they throw things at you 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?
Look, 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 on and displaced existing old companies.
I see the world more and more being not monopolized by single large companies.
Microsoft used to be considered a monopoly and everybody was afraid of it.
No longer.
Google was considered to be the monopoly.
No longer.
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 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.
If you want entrepreneurs to win, you have to give them at least a sense that they're playing in a level playing field.
The challenge, and again, I'm just using this as a calendar, I'm worried that we're seeing this concentration of value.
And I think it's been called like, I don't know, Mag7, but Mangos, I think is the new one where it includes some other people.
Where you just see this concentration of value towards them.
I think it's 85% of year-to-date value accruals been in those top names.
If you don't have that or any form of almost intervention, do you not just have the biggest companies getting bigger and bigger and running away with it?
I think there are many ways to come around it.
Taking equity is the question you asked.
I don't think that's the right model.
But let's get to what the core issue is, right?
The core issue is no new technology that's come along ultimately created less jobs.
I don't think AI is going to be anything different.
But...
When new technologies come along, even from the agrarian revolution to the industrial revolution, the transition generation suffers.
There's collateral damage.
Because we are creating so much wealth, is there a way to take a portion of that wealth and make sure that the people caught in the transition don't have to suffer as collateral damage?
There should be a construct.
That's for the political figures to figure out, right?
There should be a construct.
And I'm completely for that.
because these are people for no fault of their own.
You know, we in Silicon Valley said everybody learned how to code because if you don't know how to code, you don't have a future.
Suddenly comes AI and we are saying you coders have no future.
Code?
You don't need to do that.
Yeah, why are you doing that, right?
So as a society, as a technology industry, I think we should be empathetic to taking care of those people.
We mentioned some of the big names in terms of the biggest companies of our day.
Their focus on energy, acquiring energy supply is more important than ever.
Are we seeing the hyperscalers secretly become energy companies in some ways?
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.
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.
And that digital electricity...
for many reasons I can walk you through, is going to be more efficient, it's going to be cleaner, it's going to be more reliable.
And when 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 countries that are in the developing basket, are going to benefit from this.
Just like an airbag comes...
in a very expensive car initially.
And within a few years, you see it in every car and it improves everybody's lives.
So I'm super optimistic that if we look back 20 years from now, we will say AI was the best thing that happened because of which electricity abundance happened to everybody on the planet.
AI is just a catalyst, a stepping stone, and an accelerator.
You said before, speaking of that, about the ability to produce tens of gigawatts of power generation on the grid in a hurry.
It's a pretty big claim.
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?
Look, we have developed a technology which does not use the traditional power supply chains.
And the technologies we use are more akin to 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 5,000 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.
is not easy, just like I learned the very first time I had to build a product with Antigrow.
But I'm still here to talk about that story, which means we are good learners.
We learn how to get up when we fall.
So you are able to scale production to the tens of gigawatts in a way that other energy alternatives are not able to.
Exactly.
Hence the 1,200% increase in stock price.
It's compelling.
For you, 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 20 billion, I think.
Yes.
So 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 to build a green field.
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 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 centers, there's a supply chain 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.
Those are the big bottlenecks.
I don't see us delivering the product as a bottleneck right now.
When you think about...
your ability to build that scale, it would put you in a dominant slash winning position.
When you think about the winners that emerged from this incredible technology revolution, 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 value accrual in the space, what's the utility and what's the valuable resource?
At the end of the day, I would think almost all of the sectors are winners.
It's just what are the names in each one of those verticals that you mentioned.
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 winners.
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 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 the 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 because they're the service providers that provide all this.
And everybody who supports the ecosystem wins.
But to me, on the electricity side that you focused on, electricity is the one large infrastructure that's not come to the edge.
It's always so far been very large power plants built very far away with transmission distribution coming in highways and, you know, like surface streets to you.
How is it that electricity runs digital, but electricity alone doesn't get smart, doesn't come to the edge?
That's what Bloom's about.
That's the Bloom story.
We believe bringing power to the edge has to happen.
That is the digital transformation of electricity.
And we are the only purpose-built, purpose-created company that created a technology and a platform that comes to the edge.
What does no one see about what happens when power comes to the edge?
What they don't see today is in a world where everything is digital, having power outages for any reason.
It's 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, 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.
I'm just struggling to reconcile.
A lot of the world's biggest leaders telling me that power is the biggest problem.
And I speak to you and I'm like, I'll speak to my friend KR because he's got unlimited power and it's at the edge and he's able to provide it very sufficiently and well.
How do I reconcile power as the problem with your saying, hey, we can produce it in large quantities and bring it to the edge in a way that others can't?
Why are they still saying that?
It's a scale issue, right?
Again, you're beginning to see the hockey stick, but it's the beginning stages.
So I completely sympathize with how you see it, and I agree with it.
And let's put this in perspective.
Electricity in the world is a $5.5 trillion market.
Last year, our revenues were $2 billion.
So we need to catch up.
You've done well, but you've got a long way to go.
Yeah, we have a long way to go.
But make no mistake, power at the edge is coming, is going to be dominant, and it's going to transform the electricity industry.
We're going to look back at this age and say AI accelerated that, and that's a good thing for everybody on the planet because of two reasons, right?
People talk about clean power.
The only reason we tolerate power that's not clean is it's out of sight, out of mind, somewhere far away.
If it's outside your bedroom window, if it's outside your office window, you don't care about what the regulations are.
You want it to be clean.
You want your children to breathe that clean air.
So clean will become just second nature, stable stakes.
So there's so many other benefits that are going to come from having power at the edge.
And number two is anytime you develop power from or you transform power from a molecule to electricity, there's heat associated with that.
That heat in a large power plant gets wasted.
When it's close to the edge, you use it for heating, you use it for cooling.
So you're able to use that molecule in a much more efficient manner, much more sustainable manner.
So it not only brings you control and destiny, which you need, it also brings all the other good attributes of it.
And when power is democratized, access is not restricted by people who are in power.
And that's true democracy.
My question on the back of that is, if I were the president and I put you in charge of policy and regulation, I said, KR, make America a powerhouse for power.
Yeah.
What would you do differently that we're not doing today?
I'm not asking you to critique any of the current administration, but what would you do to make America a powerhouse and policy and regulation around power?
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.
Okay, 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 the enemy of the best.
So we should be able to provide that.
And we should use boxes like what we built.
to be able to bring that distributed power to anybody on the planet.
Let us not let the people who don't have our best interest supplying power to us, supplying energy to us.
That would be the immediate pathway, I would tell the president, is that let's bring free fuel from a free world to make more of the world free.
How criminal is it that we still buy so much energy from Russia, an adversary that we are openly, you know...
funding their competitor of, but we're still funding them to buy energy from.
Exactly.
So why would we need to do that?
It is illogical.
It's not rational.
And there's a better way.
You mentioned that kind of the ability for a village in Iceland to store their own energy for when it's not maybe abundant.
We talk a lot about model sovereignty.
Oh, we need our own models in Europe.
It strikes me that energy sovereignty is much more important.
Would you agree that energy sovereignty is more important and the most important thing?
I think of all the supply chains in the world.
We pretty much know how to grow food wherever we are.
After food, it's energy sovereignty, period.
If you just go back to the history of the world, right?
Big wars have been fought for water.
If there's a river flowing through multiple countries, big wars have been fought for water rights.
We know how to produce water.
Big wars have been fought for food.
We know how to produce food.
Big wars are being fought for energy, are being fought for energy as we speak.
And we can avoid that.
When we think about...
energy abundance for a futuristic data center in space is often kind of proclaimed to be this kind of holy grail capturing energy from the sun and how much of a solution is that versus a bluntly unrealistic pipe dream?
You know, I worked on the Mars missions and I know how to produce water and breathing air on Mars.
Trust me, it's really hard.
I wasn't doubting it, K.R.
You can squeeze water out of a rock, but why?
There are better ways to do that right now on Earth.
Can I ask, in Oracle, I 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?
So, you know, the proof is in the pudding, right?
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 a 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 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 for a year?
I said, absolutely.
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.
They were thrilled with what they saw.
So now that formed the basis for them to say, why would we go and look for other solutions when we have a great solution that fits the bill?
There are so many attributes of the Bloom system.
that are so well done for a data center.
Let me give you two or three simple examples so you can understand.
If you have a large turbine, let's say it's 500 megawatts, one single large turbine, powering a 500 megawatt data center, that turbine's availability over a 20-year period on a yearly basis will be somewhere in the low 90s, you know, 90%.
Because you need to maintain the turbine.
It's like your jet engine or it's like your car.
It has to stop.
You have to maintain it.
What happens during the other 10%?
Are you going to turn down the data center?
You can't.
The data center has to be always on.
In the past, when the data centers were small, you relied on the grid to be the backup.
Now there is no grid that is a gigawatt in size that can be backing you up.
So what do you have to do?
You have to put two turbines instead of one and have one as the backup when one fails or one has to be overhauled.
With Bloom, we are tiny, modular, power builders, each one 50 kilowatts.
So you can hot swap any one when you're working with it, very similar to how a data center is built.
If you look at the architecture of the Bloom system, it's very much like the architecture of the data center.
You have so many different server blades, and any one server blade going down does not take the data center down.
There's so many racks, any one rack going down does not take the entire data center down.
Our architecture is exactly like that.
So you don't have to overbuild us.
by anything more than a small percentage compared to the large turbines, number one.
Number two, we're a solid state device, which means we can ramp up and ramp down in power in milliseconds, which is what the AI loads need.
AI loads are like the brain.
Just think about it.
Our brain goes into huge activity, pulse, a lot of energy, then it calms down.
The same thing happens in an AI data center with all the GPUs.
Think about a turbine.
Think about your car.
Even if you have the fastest car, 0 to 60 takes a few seconds because a mechanical device that has to ramp up and ramp down.
We are a solid state device that can ramp up and down very fast.
So all the batteries that they needed to provide this ramp, they don't need it with Bloom.
And then we can scale as you go.
You cannot put a partial turbine to power a data center as it's building and then keep adding turbine blades as the data center is ramping up.
With Bloom, it's completely different.
Just tell me what you need today.
And as you're growing, we'll just keep adding the Lego blocks.
So when I tell you that Bloom was purpose-built and purpose-designed for the digital infrastructure, it was truly done that way.
And the Band-Aids that you put on the mechanical age infrastructure, like turbines and engines, simply cannot do that.
They saw all these advantages.
And so it was a fairly easy conversation.
You said about 55 days, not 90.
That is one undershot.
I mean, amazingly done.
When does the primary focus for customers move from speed to cost?
And how price sensitive are customers?
You know, with electricity, go back to the context we talked about.
It is the primary input to manufacturing intelligence.
At the end of the day, when you look at it end to end, it's neither price nor cost, it's value.
You're generating tokens.
The token has a value.
What's that entire stream look like?
And how can you maximize the value?
So the reason I'm saying that is the cost of electricity as we used to think when the grid was supplying it, because it was a one-size-fits-all electricity.
What Bloom makes is designer electricity.
So the one-size-fits-all electricity means that you buy that electricity, and then you have to make all the alterations to that one-size-fits-all.
which is all the gear that you put in your data center that you own, that you operate, that you maintain, and those things fail, they create reliability issues, you have to deal with all that and all the inefficiency associated with that.
With Bloom, we tailor fit exactly what the needs for generating that token are.
And the benefits from being tailor-fitted versus one-size-fits-all horizontal is?
Cost of the token generated, the amount of power needed for that, and the amount of gas needed for that, the amount of copper needed for that, the amount of other supply chain and tradesmen needed for that.
So it's efficiency, that lack of wastage.
It's entire efficiency.
It's an entire stack efficiency, the full vertical stack.
It's almost like you are custom designing a furniture for your own home that fits perfectly as opposed to just generic cubes.
Your backlog is 20 billion and the manufacturing capacity is a gigawatt today.
What's the manufacturing capacity by the end of this year?
We'll be over 2 gigawatts.
We said that publicly.
And what we also said is going forward, we're 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.
What does the scaling trajectory look like?
One now, two end of year, end of 27, is that two to 10?
Is that grossly impossible?
Because we're a public company, we have not given forward guidance on that.
So I don't feel comfortable giving you a number.
But the promise we have made to our customers and to the market is you come in and put a firm deposit for power.
Before you build your Greenfield data center, we'll have that power for you.
We will not be the bottleneck.
Do you have a concentration in terms of customers and revenue?
No, we don't.
We are signed up with multiple hyperscalers.
Yeah.
We are signed up with multiple NeoClouds.
More importantly, it's not just not having an AI concentration.
We have a robust commercial and industrial business.
We power factories.
We power Home Depots and Costcos and Walmarts.
We power college campuses.
Two-thirds of Caltech campus is powered by us.
Anybody who needs reliable power should use us.
One thing I'm interested by is you've become famous also in...
social media circles because of Leo Aschenbrenner and his investment in the company.
Have you seen the effect of him being an investor on the company in terms of recognition, awareness, employee recognition?
You know, the first time I knew about it was when my, you know, 22-year-old daughter showed me that all her friends are talking about it because of social media.
But I've, like, met him since.
He's a very sharp, deep-thinking individual.
I think he's got some tremendous ideas of where things are.
We obviously agree with his thesis on Bloom.
The impact, I think, look, it's going to come from multiple, multiple areas.
This is a huge concept.
The idea of distributed power coming to the edge is a concept that's going to change dramatically city planning access.
The need for people to move from an inaccessible area to a metropolitan city, their next generation can have a better life.
I don't think that's the way 10 billion people should live on the planet.
So let me explain this.
The only reason parents will leave their idyllic village settings and move into a city and live in paltry conditions, you know, they're willing to compromise their own life so their kids have better access.
Why not bring the access right where they live?
In a digital age, you can bring all the information, you can bring everything else there.
If you brought electricity, I think it changes.
how the world can think about itself.
So you think we'll see a change in the distribution of people in cities and countryside, and more will remain outside of cities because of the lack of need?
Yeah.
Throughout human history, if you look at where people concentrated, it was for access.
So anywhere there was a waterway, by rivers, by the coast, is where people settled, because waterways were a great way to trade, and it was access.
And then you just look at the large railroads, you look at the big highways, where they intersect is where large cities are, or that's where access is created.
So access was created by people who control, and they control where people lived.
If you can break that using distributed, again, going back to true democracy, you just democratize things.
Any technology coming to the edge democratizes it.
Your cell phone today is your personal device with only the things you want.
Did the landline telephone ever give you that access?
No.
That's true democracy, technology bringing true democracy.
If you're able to do that with power, it changes geopolitics.
The business has changed a lot in the last two to three years.
What have you most significantly changed your mind on in the last two to three years as a result of the incredible parabolic growth that you've seen?
I think until the time when this big switch happened.
We were a lot more internally focused, and I did not spend much time talking about the bigger ideas and where this can ultimately go, because it was not the right time to do that.
Now, we feel as a company, we have a larger mandate than just building the company, but to also speak about where the future can be in terms of electricity for all, abundance for all.
So that's a big shift in my mindset.
So I'm spending more time.
speaking about it and talking to people about it.
I would be remiss not to ask this while I have the chance.
You mentioned, you know, your children, talking about it from social media.
You know, when I grow up, I want to be UKR is the takeaway I have from this conversation.
And with that, you're a CEO of an incredible business.
You're also a father.
What would be your biggest parenting advice, having run a business for 25 years to the multi, multi, multi billions?
What's your biggest lessons and advice on how to do both so well?
You know, this is what I would tell my kids is I would say, be good people and be happy.
Just work on the things you're passionate about.
I would love to do a quick fire.
Speaking of passions, what was your biggest lesson from working with John Doar?
To dream big.
What's one widely held belief about AI that you think is completely wrong?
That it is going to diminish the number of jobs.
Who's the most underrated person in the energy transition that doesn't get enough spotlight?
I think the people who created horizontal drilling and figured out how to extract more gas and more oil in a clear way as a bridge to the future, that entire sector is underrated.
Which country is set up best to be a powerhouse in the next decade?
I think it's still the US.
Is Europe slightly screwed?
I think Europe is waking up faster than I would have expected because of AI.
And I'm optimistic hearing both from the EU and UK about the changes they want to make.
The key is going to be, can they really make the changes fast enough?
If you had unlimited money as a business, what would you do that you're not doing today?
We would be going to the rest of the world where they don't have the upfront money and capital to buy our boxes and our infrastructure and putting that in and collecting later once they benefit from it.
How able are you to move at speed into Asia?
We are very well prepared to move anywhere in the world today, but it'll be a very focused effort.
And when we go to other countries, we'll always look for a partner in the country.
What do you think a lot about, but you don't ever see it or see it often in the news?
I think about creating more equal access.
Equity is different, but creating access is important.
Giving everybody an opportunity is super important to me.
What they make of that opportunity is up to them.
25 years.
What was the hardest time?
It was post-financial crisis.
We had built a completely U.S.
supply chain.
And because the big three automotives had failed, they were all not able to keep their promises to me because we were just a development company at that time.
And I had to, within months, find a plan B for what is a strong plan A, six years in the making.
It was a very difficult time to get through that.
Penultimate one.
What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?
So I was in China in a remote part at a bad accident where I could have easily bled to death.
And I was driven to the hospital.
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 he stitched me up.
And when I look back, there's a very kind thing that he did for me, not listening to me.
Wow, that changes some perspective.
Final one for you.
What are you most excited about when you look forward to the next 10 years?
I like to end on a theme of positivity.
I think there's too much negativity in the world.
What are you most excited for?
I truly believe we will look back at this huge hunger for power that AI created and the most wealthy companies in the world wanting to get ahead, being the single most important reason for us to figure out digital power for the digital world and creating abundance of power.
that's not in conflict with the environment and making it affordable.
That ultimately, there is no energy-poor country that's economically rich.
If we create energy abundance, we create economic abundance, and that lifts all boats everywhere.
So I'm super excited about that opportunity, and I almost have trouble sleeping when I think about what a brilliant world that can be.
Yeah, listen, I've so loved doing this.
Thank you so much for being so wonderfully thoughtful, brilliant, artistic with storytelling.
You've been amazing, so I so appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
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