Chamath Palihapitiya

Here is a bunch of money that we have allocated to go and fit your house out with solar, with storage, with next generation heat pumps, with a modern set of infrastructure so that you are totally resilient and now you are completely ambivalent

to what the grid has to do in reaction to all the demand that's coming.

Well, Jason, the president's been ahead of the curve on this issue really since the beginning of the administration.

I don't know if you recall, but he said that he was going to make AI companies into the biggest power companies because he understood.

that the data centers that they needed required a lot of power, but they were gonna stand up their own power generation, and they wouldn't just draw off the grid.

And so I think this understanding has always been there.

When I've talked to the hyperscalers, they also tell me that their plan is not to draw from the grid, it's to basically set up their own power generation behind the meter.

It's called co-location.

And in fact, I think ultimately this will bring down rates for residential consumers for two reasons.

One is that when the data centers create their own power, they can sell back or donate back to the grid when they connect.

They don't have to connect to the grid, but

Once they do, they can donate back.

And then second, there's a number of fixed costs in power generation.

It's not just variable, right?

There's these large fixed costs.

And so as you increase scale, those fixed costs get amortized over a greater amount of supply.

And that brings down the variable rate, basically the meter rate for everybody.

So scale is good.

And I think the deceptive nature of the criticism here by like Bernie Sanders and people like that is what they say is, well, we just have to shut down all the data centers, period.

When the real problem here is that he and others like him have over-regulated power generation to death so that it's too hard to set up net new power, right?