Daniel Yergin

So this question of what are the supply chains to assure electricity to support this AI boom, which represents in the United States about half of GDP growth.

I think these tech companies are going to be much bigger players in electricity than they would have been in the past.

I remember, again, the president of one of those companies said in 2008, when they built their first data center, they didn't talk about electricity.

They didn't worry about electricity.

So it's been a huge learning.

And as one of them said, we've had to learn to talk to the power industry.

You know, a software engineer, maybe, I don't know, it's a month or two of work to do software.

It's seven or eight or 10 years from an energy company for an engineer to get a project done.

And that's the gulf between the two of them.

and the sense that there is a race, and it's always said it's the US-China race, but it's also a race very definitely among companies to build capacity.

Now, one question I think you were getting at was that the sense that there is the contrarian view that chips will become more efficient and maybe electricity demand will not be as great as it is,

But at this point, every time you talk to a utility executive, they say, and we heard this at CERWIC, when they had years and years of no growth or very flat growth in demand, they'll say this year it's going to grow 5% or it's going to grow 8%.

And there are only so many electricians.

There are only so many transformers.

So again, those supply chains are very important there too.

Yeah, we can see that they've hired people who come out of the energy industry, either from the oil and gas industry or energy.

in electric power industry.

So they're building up the capacity to do that.

And their investments show it.

You mentioned one company, but look at Amazon.