Surviving Mark Zuckerberg's intense founder era: Fmr Meta CTO

Brian Sozzi (0:03)

All right, welcome to a new episode of Power Players here. Super excited about my next guest. He has probably one of the most amazing careers in tech that you will hear and see around. It's Mike Schroepfer, Gigascale Capital founding partner. Mike, good to see you, man.

Mike Schroepfer (0:19)

Hey, glad to be here.

Brian Sozzi (0:21)

Tell me about these autonomous buoys in the ocean.

I know, random place to start, but I was researching you, man. Mike, I see a picture of a giant buoy that is seemingly producing energy, that might have something to do with AI. I'm like, I'm going there off the jump.

Mike Schroepfer (0:37)

Yeah, let's go straight to it. Here's the fun bit. Okay. So when you look at the world and you say, where can we get a whole heck of a lot more energy cheaply and reliably with little damage to the environment? It turns out there's this big band of the Southern Ocean where there's 10 terawatts of wave energy just sitting there with nothing happening. We're not harnessing at all.

And so this company has this idea of a very simple machine. It literally is buoy, like you said, it bobs up and down in the waves and it uses that bobbing motion to pump water, to run a turbine. You could think of it like a hydropower dam, you know, water flows through a thing and spins it, makes electricity. Same concept here, just bobbing up and down in the ocean. Of course, the question everyone asks is like, that's neat and all. What do you do with the power?

And the answer is quite simple with the advent of Starlink and AI Inference, which as this turns out to be the perfect platform to run AI Inference nodes, because Starlink has plenty of bandwidth, and you also are sitting in very cold ocean water, so solving all the cooling problems becomes very straightforward as well. And that's the deal. So it's a floating autonomous AI Inference data center.

Brian Sozzi (1:48)

So before I get into why, if you're watching or listening this, why you're having or seeing Mike talk about autonomous buoys, I should mention, Mike spent 18 years at Meta. He led their engineering team from 150 to 35,000. He was their CTO from 2013 to 2022, led the deals on Oculus, Instagram. This guy's done it all. So that's why we're starting here on buoys that generate energy. When will we see these in business, Mike? When do I go to the beach and I see these buoys floating around?

Mike Schroepfer (2:20)

Yeah, the question is, when will your ChatGPT or anthropic query be served by clean renewable energy in the far ocean? They're going to be testing units off the coast of the West Coast of the USA this year.

Brian Sozzi (2:37)

That is absolutely easy.

Mike Schroepfer (2:38)

I don't know commercial operation next year, year after maybe. It's not years out, it's in the near future.

Brian Sozzi (2:43)

How do you find at Gigascale, how are you finding opportunities like this? This is clever as hell. All I'm hearing about every day is, we need to build data centers in space, why don't we use the ocean? At least we know more about it, right?

Mike Schroepfer (2:57)

Yeah, and it turns out it is order of magnitude are more cheaper for me to put a ton of material in the ocean than it is to lift it all the way up into space. So a lot of things have to go right for you to make the economics work of launching things into space versus using the ocean. We've been putting stuff in the ocean for very long. We have big, giant cargo ships.

We've invested a tremendous amount of money in floating oil and gas platforms. And I'm just saying, how about we use that same technology and make clean energy and use it to power data centers? The beauty of this too is it solves the not in my backyard problem, which is everyone's concerned about a data center, concerned about power competition and power prices and noise and all the rest of it. It's like, well, these things are in a part of the ocean where there's literally nothing going on. So, it's a great way to take demand off the grid.

And so, I'm pretty excited about it. Back to your question, we scout, we start with top down, where are the interesting problems to go solve? And then luckily with my background, a lot of people find us. So, it's a little bit of everything. People come to us with crazy ideas every day, and then we have some opinions on which things are more or less interesting. But I think that there are a lot to be optimistic about in the future in terms of innovation happening in the physical world and sort of the cleaner, better future it can bring for us.