Why Elon Wants to Put Data Centers in Space | Ramez Naam

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:00)
So good, so good, so good.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag & Bone, Levi's, Adidas and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free.
Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:28)
The FIFA World Cup is here and you can now feel the thrill of the pitch in FIFA World Cup Launch Edition on Netflix, a fast and fluid football game where your phone is the controller and the TV is the stadium. Play for your country in 16 different stadiums with up to four friends, all included in your membership. Scroll to the games tab on your TV and play FIFA World Cup Launch Edition now only on Netflix.

**Ramez Naam** (0:53)
The Bitcoin miners I know are all shifting to AI. I think you've covered this as well. It's because they have access to power and that is the bottleneck. You just make more dollars per kilowatt hour going into an AI compute than you do in Bitcoin ultimately.
B, because power is the constraint, the value flows to what's scarce.

**Anthony Pompliano** (1:16)
Bang, bang. Today, guys, we got a great conversation with Ramez Naam. He's an investor at Planetary VC. And in this conversation, we're getting deep into the weeds of what's going on in the artificial intelligence space. We know that energy and power are a massive bottleneck. And Ramez is here to explain exactly what the potential solutions are, who's likely to win and what are the various companies doing so that we can get more power to get to super intelligence. On top of that, we talk about how super intelligence is actually going to be applied. It's going to be general or narrow. What is it going to mean for you? And what are some of the companies that he's excited about? They're actually helping to usher in a world where super intelligence makes you and I happier, healthier, wealthier, and richer. Sounds good to me. Ramez is here to explain it all. Here's my conversation with Ramez Naam.
All right, Ramez, there's a massive problem in the AI industry. Energy and power are the bottleneck at the moment. Can you please help us understand why is this problem persist and what are the potential solutions as to how we're going to get around this?

**Ramez Naam** (2:08)
Yeah, absolutely. AI is hugely compute intensive. The way that we've been making AI better is the scaling laws. The scaling laws look awesome at the beginning, but they're brutal. It means you have to keep doubling the amount of compute to get linear gains in AI performance. There's this huge race to do so, and we're just not used to expanding the grid at this pace. In the 50s, we built out the grid five, seven percent growth a year, but for the last two decades, it's been zero growth. We're just not accustomed to putting on new power or new sources of demand at this pace.
The poles and wires themselves are the bottleneck right now. Chip production is about twice the pace that we can hook things up to the grid, and that's the bottleneck everyone is trying to work around.

**Anthony Pompliano** (2:56)
Now, when you think about that bottleneck, can you walk through, there's different companies with different potential solutions for this. They're all racing to see not only what solution is going to be the one that is the winner, but also how do they fund it? How do they build it? There's a lot of stuff, supply chain issues. What are the ones that you're most excited about or the ones you think are most noteworthy as a solution?

**Ramez Naam** (3:17)
Well, let me walk you through the overall set of options people have. Option one is you're going to build a data center, you put in a request to the grid to get hooked up. A few years ago, that was fine. Now, it's maybe a five to seven-year wait. Option two is behind the meter power. People are trying to buy natural gas turbines to build on-site at their data center, to run their load. The big turbines made by companies like GE are sold out five to seven years. Now, they're turning to smaller turbines, they're maybe a tenth, a twentieth the size, and a whole bunch of these things on the back of semi-tractor trailers basically. You have companies, Boom Supersonic was trying to build a supersonic jet a few years ago, or as recently as six months ago, they've pivoted to taking their engine and making it a power plant for behind-the-meter power for data centers.