David Kirtley: commitment

Transcript context

…So a deeper integration between the power plant and the thing that it’s powering. And it does seem like in the future, quite possibly, a lot of the energy that’s needed will be for compute, for AI-related applications. So if you just look out into the future 10, 20, 50 years from now, do you see nuclear fusion as a thing that powers these gigantic data centers of millions of GPUs? Just basically, the surface of the Earth covered in compute and nuclear fusion power plants. Maybe that’s 100 years out. So when I talk to AI experts, they talk pretty routinely about the power needs for AI. And in fact, in the same way in manufacturing that the cost of any one thing asymptotes to the raw material, for AI, the cost of computation asymptotes to the power… …To the cost of the electricity. And even more, that electricity’s concentrated. It’s in that AI data center, that brain where all the power is, and you really want a lot of high-energy density. You want power generation right there… …on-site. So it seems like, just take those two facts, a really nice match between fusion, which is baseload, high energy density, can be sited most places, and a data center, which is going to be high energy requirements in a local location, and large amounts of it. There’s been predictions recently from energy institutes that suggest we will have growth that, rather than a 2% growth per year in electricity, may be a 4 or a 6% growth in electricity due to data center use. I think that is probably wildly underestimating where we’re moving. And, and so- Oh, man.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.