Jensen Huang: prediction

Transcript context

…Interesting. That’s great to hear. So maybe if we can just linger on the power for a little bit. What are your hopes for how to solve the energy problem? One of the areas, Lex, that I would love us to talk about and just get the message out, you know, our power grid is designed for the worst case condition with some margin. Well, 99% of the time we’re nowhere near the worst case condition because the worst case condition is a few days in the winter, a few days in the summer, and extreme weather. Most of the time we’re nowhere near the worst case condition and we’re probably running around, call it 60% of peak. And so 99% of the time, our power grid has excess power, and they’re just sitting idle, but they have to be there sitting idle because just in case, when the time comes, hospitals have to be powered and, you know, infrastructure has to be powered and airports have to run and so on and so forth. And so the question that I have is whether we could go and help them understand and create contractual agreements and design computer architecture systems, data centers, such that when they need the maximum power for infrastructure in society, that the data centers would get less. But that’s in a very rare instance anyways. And during that time, we either have a backup generator for that little part of it, or we just have our computers shift the workload somewhere else, or we have the computers just run slower. You know, we could degrade our performance, reduce our power consumption and provide for a, you know, slightly longer latency response, you know, when somebody asks for, you know, asks for an answer. And so I think that that, that way of using computers, of building data centers, instead of expecting 100% uptime—and these contracts that are really, really quite rigorous, it’s putting a lot of pressure on the grid to be able to… Now, they’re gonna have to increase from their maximum. I just wanna use their excess. It’s just sitting there. Yeah, that’s not talked about enough. So what’s stopping there? Is it regulation? Is it bureaucracy?…

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