Transcription
To lose is something I simply cannot contemplate. There's nothing that I do where I put effort, I put time, and I think of failure as an option.
Today, KR Shridha, founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, joins us in the studio. Now, KR's journey is wild. Former NASA rocket scientist who worked on Mars missions before founding the energy company that is Bloom. 25 years building a company he never once doubted would work.
Ne revolution. And I would call AI absolutely a revolution. It's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick. Clearly, electricity becomes the key factor.
>> Today, the market cap is approximately 93 billion, up over 1,500% in a single year.
>> Electricity in the world is a $5.5 trillion market. Last year, our revenues were 2 billion.
>> This was a really special show for me to do.
>> When power is democratized, access is not restricted by people who are in power. And that's true democracy. I would say don't short the US. Don't short Silicon Valley.
>> Ready to go.
>> KR, I'm so excited for this. I am like the biggest fan of the company and the story. So, it's such a pleasure to have you here in person.
>> Thank you so much for having me. It's a great honor to be here.
>> Now, listen. I I asked some of the best founders in the world this question, but it really intrigues me on mindset. Are you more motivated by the thrill of winning or the fear of failing? To lose is something I simply cannot contemplate. There's nothing that I do where I put effort, I put time, and I think of failure as an option.
Before starting the company, I did the Mars missions and there you cannot call a plumber on Mars. You cannot fix something along the way. So what you do is you think through let me think about the 10 big things. A boom can happen and it ruins your life. Then you say, "Okay, I'm going to mitigate that by every possible workaround because something's going to happen." So, I hate failure, but the way I deal with failure is risk mitigation. Think about things that can go wrong and prepare ahead of time for a plan around it, for a workound around because bad things can happen. You can fall down. Falling down is not what I'm concerned about. It's about the getting up.
>> What would you say to someone who is struggling to get up? If you're advising your child, maybe there's a lot of people who've gone through layoffs. It's a tough time in tech for that. Who is struggling to get up again.
The really hard experiences are what shape you, what you're really made of. It's very easy to feel like you're a hero when everything is going well for you. These hard experiences, as hard as they may be, if you just learn from it and look forward, don't look in the rearview mirror. When you're driving, you're looking through the windshield. You're looking forward, okay? You just look in the rearview mirror only to learn not to play the bad movie again and again. You know, if if that was a bad experience for you, it's like watching a bad movie. Why would you play the bad movie again in your mind? Which is what you do, right? It is so nonsensical. Learn from it. Look forward. Believe that tomorrow is always going to be better than today. And at a minimum, life gets easier when you have that attitude.
You have the most calming presence. Seriously, I've almost ever interviewed, which is astonishing. I've done, you know, set 3,000 interviews. When you say look forward, tomorrow is kind of better than today. The interesting thing with this business is it's 25 years old and it's become a darling in the last 2 years, whatever we want to call that time frame. Did you always know this time was going to happen or respectfully was it a market moving in directions we couldn't anticipate?
So if you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Door, the summary page puts out a data center. It puts out a bloom box powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling for the data center, and it being connected to nothing else. And what we're doing today, the reason it's becoming the darling is those data centers are finally waking up and saying this is the right solution for us. For me, the period between 2001 and now the 25 years was never a question of if. It was a question of when and how soon.
>> Did you ever doubt it? I mean, 25 years is astonishing. Hale.
>> There was not a single night I went home and worried about the company surviving or doing well or whether I had made a mistake jumping into this field. There were several days there were several times where the company had existential threats to it that we had to overcome. But in my mind again failure was never an option. So, I really never once worried about when we wake up tomorrow morning, are we going to be better off than we were the previous day?
>> You mentioned John Door, an incredible individual. You've had several incredible individuals be part of the journey. I read that there was an Andy Grove moment that really shaped your thinking on leadership. Can you tell me about that moment and how it shaped your leadership?
>> Sure. Um so uh I'm a technologist. I used to be a rocket scientist. So here I am starting a company. And when I started the company, if you had given me, if you had said PNL, Eida, all those, you know, financial terms, I wouldn't even know what that meant. And I learned along the way. So here I am. I know how to build oneoff and really well because that's what we did for the space missions. That's what we did in our university labs. So we built this one off two off of the first bloom boxes that are out there working at Google other places doing very well. After we built the first five, me and the engineers said we can now hand it off to manufacturing and ask them to make it. And uh little did we know our engineering intent, our design intent, everything we knew had to be written up in such elaborate terms in terms of manufacturing in instructions for somebody who is just a technician who does not know the engineering content but will do exactly what they're being told to make these boxes. So here we bu build the next 10, the next 20. They're all going out in the in the field and failing spectacularly. And it's a shock because in those early days, uh they're expensive first units. Reputation is on the line. So I go, this cannot scale. So I just stop production. I call my board and I say, I need help. I need people to come and help me tell me how to do manufacturing. I don't know. So, uh, one of the people that come is Andy Grow who became a great friend and a mentor and a valley legend. And then there are some other manufacturing gurus. One of them was on my board. So, we were asked to compile all the data we had. So we have three ring binders after three ring binders. Now we're talking about the time when we still used paper for everything, right? So we had them all packed. We had an entire executive team sitting on one side of a large boardroom. These great advisors sitting on the other side including Andy Gro. And we had dinner ordered and we had all these stacks. We're thinking we're going to stay up all night until we get to the solving the problem. So we all sit down and as soon as we start talking I don't know that we finished the first sentence and he says can you stop for a minute and he says can everybody else in the room leave um from the executive team other than KR. And so I have this group of illuminaries sitting on the other side and me sitting on this side looking it almost looks like a firing squad. And then Andy says what's wrong? So I begin to explain what I think may be wrong. He says, "No, no, no. Stop. What's wrong?" I say something else, thinking that I didn't get through to him properly. And after the third time, he he's like, "K," he just leans over and he says, "I want to know what's wrong with you." And it shocks me. It just shocks me for a moment. I sit back and I go, "I'm trying to build a great device that's going to be beneficial to people. I don't know what's wrong with me." And he says, "You're such a smart guy. You built this technology that's just absolutely amazing. If you walk the floors and talk to the people out there, they're going to tell you why it's not working because they don't understand what they're building. Have you talked to people and have they told you what they don't know? And it dawns on me that I've never done that. Then he says, I know all these other guys want to go through those training binders. None of us know your product better than you. If you're smart enough to design it, you'll be smart enough to figure it out. Don't waste your time listening to everybody else and me. Go figure it out. That was the best piece of advice I ever got.
>> What do you take from that walk the floor? It's like proximity to customers. It's proximity team. How did that shape how you think about your go forward mindset?
>> Great question. So, this is not just about the shop floor. What Andy Gro was teaching you was you have you need to have the empathy to be able to relate to every aspect of your business. And when you develop that empathy and when you practice that empathy by walking on the floor talking to your shop floor team members who are building your product, they will tell you things and the things they tell you are going to make the difference between you being a good company and a great company. You do the same thing with your customers. You don't tell them why your product is great and they should buy. You go there to find out what is their pain and what problems do they want you to solve for them. That's empathy. Then you design your product accordingly. And here's what I can tell you. Our shop floor employees walking there talking to them and telling them why it matters, telling them why what they do matters. So when we have our all hands meetings or forget the all hands meetings if you're having a dinner party with executives when I toast these days I always remember to say we're toasting right now this great champagne or whatever it is that we're toasting but we're able to do this because there are some technicians on the floor right now. Nobody is policing them, but their pride, their dedication, they're building an amazing product. Let's toast to them.
>> I I love that and I love the the humility. again it's an amazing calming presence that you have and I was watching some of your other interviews before this and you know candidly you said that AIdriven power demand is secular and enduring and K I have many great people on the show and they talk about infrastructure bubbles and um the inevitability of kind of falters are we in an AI infrastructure bubble when you look at it from your perspective as blunt as that is people confuse markets, stock prices and infrastructure and secular changes. The stock market is going to go through whatever it goes through the any revolution and I would call AI absolutely a revolution that's going it's it's almost a hockey stick on a hockey stick, right? technology itself, digitization itself was on a was on a hockey stick in terms of us going from the mechanical age infrastructure to the digital, you know, infrastructure. AI has come and put a hockey stick on that hockey stick. So that's what we're experiencing. Anything going at that speed, will it have bumps along the road? Will it have pauses along the way? Most probably yes. You know we don't know of anything else in human history of this scale and this magnitude but I is the trajectory is the normal course after the course correction still going to be this phenomenal course? I absolutely believe so because for the first time in human history we are manufacturing intelligence. When was the last time any person anywhere in any civilization said we have too much int intelligence let's stop.
>> So I think I think this is going to be ubiquitous. When intelligence becomes ubiquitous and abundant
>> which was the scarce resource.
>> Mhm.
>> What becomes the valuable asset if intelligence is ubiquitous and abundant?
>> Wisdom. You know, AI is not going to give you wisdom. AI is not going to give you happiness. AI is not going to give you empathy that to relate to people the way you need to. At the end of the day, a bot giving you counseling. It's not going to be the same as you and me sitting here talking to each other, looking at each other, understanding the facial expressions, uh relating to one another. So, humans are social animals.
When you look at what you do today, what's the single biggest bottleneck that you face most consistently?
>> The single biggest bottleneck that I would say we face in terms of introducing a new concept into society is the friction associated with new ideas. Right? On a big macro scale, it is for good reasons. very large infrastructure in the world has been designed and regulated to move slowly. We are entering an age where that huge amount of regulation that intentionally creates friction in the process which was beneficial in the past becomes an impediment to our growth and and I'm particularly sensitive that I'm here in the European continent
>> and uh we specialize in this.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean you get A+ for
>> we had to get a permit to come up the stairs actually. Um it took a while.
Gavin Baker who's obviously a very pronounced you know thought leader in the space and brilliant investor. It did articulate though that kind of permitting and the regulatory challenges around it actually has almost helped because it throttled supply to allow it to grow in lock step and if we had unlimited supply straight away it would actually create more problems. Do you do you agree with that or do you think it actually just continues to be an inhibitor?
>> Look, in a asymmetric world where not every player views regulation and growth at that level, uh I don't think I would agree with him. If if that was a global phenomenon and everybody on the planet agreed that we will throttle and move at a particular speed, that's a different story. But that's utopia. That never happens. So being left behind because a particular country, a particular geography throttled it when somebody moved at breakneck speed becomes a real detriment to the region that throttled it.
Is there a chance that the US will be left behind because of the regulatory permitting provisions that are in place when viewed in context against Asia or China in particular where they have amazing model development and the permitting and regulatory environment is is honestly not inhibiting them at all. If everything else were equal, what you're saying would would absolutely be true. But the creative prowess, the innovative entrepreneurial spirit that you see in the United States is still a major trump card that the US has over any other place in the world today. And I would say that human spirit is going to be able to overcome whatever other obstacles we have. So I would say don't short the US. Don't short Silicon Valley.
>> Yeah, it's never a good idea.
>> Never a good idea.
>> Um
>> it's not paid well.
>> What will be a very pronounced bottleneck in 5 years time that we're not really talking about today
>> society globally? I I would say the largest bottleneck would be bringing the people who are left behind uh to some level of parody. There'll you know there'll always be gaps but what's happening for the first time in human history right it's it's not even in technology history in in human history is next to air water shelter food electricity becomes almost a necessity for a young kid being born today to have a decent modern life in this digital world and there's significant swats of this world that don't have access or affordability to that power and I think when we look look 5 years from now the need to bring that level of access and affordability uh is going to be super important.
We're both in slightly rarified heirs um in terms of um the events we go to, the people we spend time with. Candidly, I just see a smaller and smaller number of people make more and more money.
>> Mhm.
>> Do you not see the same? And as sad as it is, I think AI is doing more to concentrate wealth than it is distributed.
I wouldn't disagree with you on the number of people the the fewer number of companies that are going to make an unbelievable amount of financial um success out of AI. However, there is no known methodology to raise all boats in the world than technology. Technology has been the best equalizer in the history of mankind. Just think about infant mortality. Think about hunger. Think about clean water. Think about healthcare and the number of things we're able to cure. It is technology that's brought all that to most people in the world. There is probably no force in the world other than technology that has done that to so many people at such large scale. Is there inequity between the best health care and the lowest health care? The answer is yes. But has the health care of every living person on the planet gotten a lot better than it was because of the technological advances? The answer is yes.
>> I agree. And so the bottleneck is then bringing people along and stopping them feeling like they are an isolated majority who are now not part of the revolution. So I think I think you're touching on something super important which is abundance. When if you just think about the previous revolution we had which is the mechanical age industrial age revolution, it was still for the most part a fixed pie and in that fixed pie if you got a bigger slice of it I got a smaller slice of it. So it was a zero sum game. When you create abundance like the intelligence abundance we're talking about, abundance just changes the entire framing. You getting a larger piece of the pie is not coming at my expense. We just have to include all the people.
Can I ask an interesting one that I actually got asked on TV the other day and I was slightly taken about by asking I wasn't expecting you know when they throw things at you kind of exactly like this and you're like god I wasn't expecting that. We've seen some suggestions that actually governments should own part of the largest AI companies to bring people with them. What do you think of that as an initiative? Is it like a nominally nice marketing message but carries no weight or is it actually meaningful for people to feel like they have ownership in these companies?
Here's the thing about companies tech ownerships, right? the top 20 most important companies. That list changes every 10 years in the US. It's so unlike the EU where practically new companies have rarely come up come on and displaced existing old old companies. I see the world more and more being not monopolized by single large companies. You know, Microsoft used to be considered a monopoly and everybody was afraid of it. No longer. Google was considered to be the monopoly. No longer. So I don't see regulation having to come in. The only thing regulation can do in my opinion is stop that innovative culture. So if if the government took major equity shares in a company and because of that provided unfair access for those companies to its products and its people by definition they're stopping the startups who have better ideas to come and compete for it. I think free competition. Go back to the first question you asked me, winning and losing. You want to win and if you want entrepreneurs to win, you have to give them at least a sense that they're playing in a level playing field.
the challenge and again I'm choosing this account. I'm worried that we're seeing this concentration of value and I think it's been called like mag 7 but mangoes I think is the new one where it includes you know some other people
>> where you just see this concentration of value towards them I think it's 85% of year-to- date value acral's been in those top names
>> if you don't have that or any form of almost intervention do you not just have the biggest companies getting bigger and bigger and running away with it
>> I think there are many ways to come around it taking equity is the question you asked. I don't think that's the right model. But but let's get to what the core issue is, right? The core issue is uh no new technology that's come along ultimately created less jobs. I don't think AI is going to be anything different. But when new technologies come along even from the agrarian revolution to the um you know like industrial revolution the transition generation suffers there's collateral damage because we are creating so much wealth is there a way to take a portion of that wealth and make sure that the people caught in the transition don't have to suffer as collateral damage there should be a construct that's for the political figures to figure out, right? There should be a construct and I'm and I'm completely for that because these are people for no fault of their own. You know, we in Silicon Valley said everybody learn how to code because if you don't know how to code, you don't have a future. Okay. Suddenly comes AI and we are saying you coders have no future
>> code. You don't need to do that.
>> Yeah. Why are you doing that? Right. So I think as a society as a technology industry uh I think we should be empathetic to taking care of those people.
We mentioned some of the big names in terms of the biggest companies of our day. Their focus on energy acquiring energy supply is more important than ever.
>> Are we seeing the hyperscalers secretly become energy companies in some ways?
>> Here's what's interesting, right? We're manufacturing intelligence as we spoke about and there's never been a more high value product manufactured with electricity than intelligence. So the input into the factory unlike a chemical factory where all these raw materials or other things come in and you process the input into this factory is simply electricity and data and data is everywhere. So the only real cost input coming in is electricity. The machines are the chips the output is intelligence. So this is the single largest input and that input today is not abundant right. So clearly electricity becomes the key factor. So herein I see it slightly differently. I believe the fact that electricity became so important for this critical industry that knows how to move at speed and scale is going to mean that since Edison almost 150 years later we are going to create a new construct for electricity in the world that's more digital electricity as opposed to the mechanical age electricity. Okay. And that digital electricity for many reasons I can walk you through is going to be more efficient. It's going to be cleaner. It's going to be more reliable. And when these large companies that have the resources to allow that kind of new electricity to happen at scale, it's going to trickle down to the masses everywhere. Subsaran Africa and Bangladesh to just use examples of countries that are in the you know like uh developing basket are going to benefit from this uh just like an airbag comes in a very expensive car initially and within a few years you see it in every car and it and it improves everybody's lives. So I'm super optimistic that if we look back 20 years from now, we will say AI was the best thing that happened because of which electricity abundance happened to everybody on the planet. AI is just a catalyst, a stepping stone and a and an accelerator.
>> You said before, speaking of that, about the ability to produce tens of gigawatts of power generation on the grid in a hurry.
>> Mhm.
>> There's a a quote. It's it's a pretty big claim. Like how much can you actually deploy in a hurry like speed to production? How do you think about that and how possible is it? Because scaling production is everything. How do you think about that?
Look, we have developed a technology which does not use the traditional power supply chains and the technologies we use are more akin to uh computer electronics and hardware, right? It's a solid state device that makes the electricity. So even at the tens of gigawatts, we will be singledigit percentages of the total supply chain that already exists to make other devices of similar nature. So when Steve Jobs comes and shows his first smartphone, nobody says, "Will you build will you build 5,000 of these or 10,000 of this next year?" It's in the millions. And there's a supply chain that knows how to scale very fast. That's the supply chain we're going to rely on. And that didn't happen by accident. The company was built to light up the planet. That was the mission of the company. So everything we did in the company, including our manufacturing lines, were built for one day being able to scale and scale fast. Now we are just opening that chapter and executing to that. It's all about execution. And execution at that scale is not trivial is not easy just like I learned the very first time I had to build a you know like product with Andy Grove. So but what I'm still here to talk about that story which means we are good learners. We learn we learn how to get up when we fall.
>> So you are able to scale production to the tens of gigawatts in a way that other energy alternatives are not able to.
>> Exactly. Hence the 1200% increase in stock price. It's it it's compelling. Uh for you is it we spoke earlier about bottlenecks. Is it simply regulation and permitting that prevents speed to power? Cuz your backlog book is insane. It's like 20 billion I think I
>> Yes. So look here's what happens right? If you want to build a 2 gawatt data center, it's going to take you more than a year and a half year to build a green field, there's an entire supply chain for that, including construction workers to supply chain parts related to that data center. They're all being stressed right now. There's a lot of copper that goes inside a data center. There's a supply chain issue, you know, like related to that. There's a lot of cooling that goes inside a data center. There's a supply chain issue related to that. The trades people required to build these extremely large, you know, centers. There's a supply chain, you know, related to that. So, it takes 12 to 18 months minimum to build something like that. We can stand up that power faster than they can build the data center. So, our goal at Bloom is to say power should not be a bottleneck if you rely on us. So what are our constraints? Number one, can they build it in time their data center? Can we get the permits? And the third part is we need gas. That gas supply needs to be able to come in, right? Um those are the big bottlenecks. I don't see us delivering the product as the bottleneck right now.
>> When you think about your ability to build at scale, it would put you in a dominant/winning position. When you think about the winners that emerge from this incredible technology revolution,
>> you you have different layers of the stack, is it the energy companies that produce this incredible power? Is it chip companies like Nvidia? Is it model companies like Anthropic and Open AI? When you think about like value acrruel in the space, what's the utility and what's the valuable resource?
At the end of the day, I would think there are almost all of the sectors are winners. It's it's it's just what are the names in each one of those verticals that you mentioned, right? Because if that doesn't exist, then you don't build an ecosystem that sustains. If there only a couple winners in this, AI is not going to become ubiquitous. And I absolutely believe AI will become ubiquitous, which means there's an entire chain of, you know, winners. So let's start at the very right. At the very right is the consumer, the customer who procures it and finds greater value using that product than not using that product. So they have to be a winner. So any business all the way from a mom and pop restaurant laundry store to a very large biomedical company or a uh or a you know cancer cure hospital has to benefit from it. The people have to benefit from it. They're all winners. Then you start coming to the left. Almost everything in technology ultimately moves to the edge closer to where people are. So it's not just the large big mega data centers that we are talking about right now. The AI factories, the AI factories ultimately need to have this distribution warehouse of intelligence. Those are the edge data centers residing in every neighborhood like the one we are in right now. They become winners. And then you have the people who develop all the services winning because they're the service providers that provide all this. and everybody who supports the ecosystem wins. But to me on the electricity side that you're focused on, electricity is the one large infrastructure that's not come to the edge. It's always so far been very large power plants built very far away with transmission distribution coming in highways and you know like surface streets to you. How is it that electricity runs digital but electricity alone doesn't get smart doesn't come to the edge? That's what Bloom's about. That's the Bloom story. We believe that bringing power to the edge has to happen. That is the digital transformation of electricity. And we are the only purpose-built, purpose-created company that created a technology and a platform that comes to the edge.
>> What does no one see about what happens when power comes to the edge?
>> What they don't see today is in a world where everything is digital, having power outages for any reason is unacceptable. That's like not having air to breathe because God forbid somebody is doing a surgery. That's going to be a robot relying on all the data, everything coming electronically and not having power at that moment is not an option. If you have all the transportation logistics driverless and there's a chaos, you cannot rely on some large data center far away with latency because by then enough damage has happened. You cannot afford the latency. So that needs to happen on the edge. So when everything in life depends so intimately on that power not going off. A pole and a wire running across hundreds of miles capable of disruption by mother nature capable of destruction by bad actors uh whether it's on cyber or a physical attack cannot be the only way that lifeline is delivered to you. So power has to be at the edge without a question for us to realize the entire dream of the digital transformation.
>> I'm just struggling to reconcile a lot of the world's biggest leaders telling me that power is the biggest problem.
>> Mhm.
>> and and I speak to you and I'm like, well, speak to my friend KR because he's got unlimited power and it's at the edge and he's able to provide it very sufficiently and well. How do I reconcile power is the problem with with you're saying, hey, we can produce it in large quantities and bring it to the edge in a way that others can't. Why are they still saying that?
It's a it's a scale issue, right? again again you're beginning to see the hockey stick but it's the beginning stages so I completely sympathize with how you see it and I agree with it and let's put this in perspective electricity in the world is a $5.5 trillion market uh last year our revenues were 2 billion right so we need to catch up
>> you've done well but you've got a long way to go
yeah we have a long way to go But make no mistake, power at the edge is coming, is going to be dominant, and is going to transform the electricity industry. We're going to look back at this age and say AI accelerated that, and that's a good thing for everybody on the planet because of two reasons, right? People talk about clean power. The only reason we tolerate power that's not clean is it's out of sight, out of mind somewhere far away. If it's outside your bedroom window, if it's outside your office window, you don't care about what the regulations are. You want it to be clean. You want your children to ble, you know, breathe that clean air. So clean will become just second nature stable stakes, right? So there's so many other benefits that are going to come from having power at the edge. And number two is anytime you develop power from or you you know uh transform power from a molecule to electricity, there's heat associated with that. That heat in a large power plant gets wasted. When it's close to the edge, you use it for heating, you use it for cooling. So you're able to use that molecule in a much more efficient manner, much more sustainable manner. Um so it not only brings you control and destiny which you need, it also brings all the other good attributes of it. And when power is democratized, access is not restricted by people who are in power. And that's true democracy.
My question on the back of that is if I was a president and I put you in charge of policy and regulation, I said, "K, make America a powerhouse for power."
>> Yeah.
>> What would you do differently that we're not doing today? I'm not asking you to critique any of the current administration, but like what would you do to make America a powerhouse and policy and regulation around power?
>> So, I would break that like any other business plan into a short-term, midterm, and long-term. long-term vision for the world is wherever you live there's wind, solar, geothermal, something available, you use that electricity when nature gives it to you and then you bottle that electricity when nature will not give it to you in the form of a hydrogen that you make right on site and then you recycle that hydrogen using something like bloom to be able to get reliable abundant power wherever you live. So the fact that you become self-reliant in any community whether you live in Iceland or you live in subsaharan Africa and not depend on some lifeline, some logistic lifeline bringing you energy which is critical to your well-being is huge. That's the vision I have for the long term and I'm super optimistic about that. Okay. So how do you facilitate that? But in the immediate term, America is endowed with unbelievable amounts of natural gas which is the best available option molecule. Even though it has a carbon footprint, it is the cleanest the smallest carbon footprint molecule available. We should be able to along with Australia, along with Canada, along with UAE, along with Qatar, the free world be able to provide access of that gas to practically every country in the nation. And it is affordable and economical where we don't have to burn coal. So good should not be the enemy of the best. So we should we should be able to provide that and we should use boxes like what what we build to be able to bring that distributed power to anybody in the planet right let us not let the people who don't have our best interest supplying power to us supplying energy to us that would be that would be the immediate pathway I would tell the president is that let's bring free fuel from a free world to make more of the world free.
>> How criminal is it that we still buy so much energy from Russia, an adversary that we are openly, you know, funding their competitor of, but we're still funding them to buy energy from.
>> Exactly. So why would we need to do that? It is illogical. Uh it's not rational and there's a better way.
>> You mentioned there kind of the ability for a village in Iceland to store their own energy for when it's not maybe abundant. Um we talk a lot about model sovereignty. Um oh we need our own models in here. Strikes me that energy sovereignty is much more important. Would you agree that energy sovereignty is more important and the most important thing?
I think of all the supply chains in the world. Uh we pretty much know how to grow food wherever we are. So next to after food it's energy sovereignty period. Look, if you just go back to the history of the world, right? Big wars have been fought for water. If there's a river flowing through multiple countries, big wars have been fought for water rights. We know how to produce water. Big wars have been fought for food. We know how to produce food. Big wars are being fought for energy. Are being fought for energy as we speak. And we can avoid that.
When we think about kind of energy abundance, very futuristic, data centers in space is often kind of proclaimed to be this kind of holy grail capturing energy from the sun. And you know, um, how much of a solution is that versus bluntly unrealistic pipe dream?
>> You know, I I worked on the Mars missions and I know how to produce water and breathing air on Mars. Trust me, it's really hard. Uh,
>> I wasn't doubting it. Okay. You can you can you can you can squeeze water out of a rock, but why? There are better ways to do that right now on Earth.
>> Can I ask you Oracle have an enormous deal with you? How did Larry Allison end up choosing solid oxide fuel cells to power Oracle data centers and his data centers? And what did that communication conversation look like?
>> So, you know, the proof is in the pudding, right? Um we before AI came along we had at least five or six data center customers and over a period of 10 to 12 years we've been providing reliable power to edge data centers other data centers 4 megawatt 10 megawatt 15 megawatt for a data center and our very first data center application was in 2013 when eBay which used to be eBay and PayPal together and if you think about about it right PayPal's entire business is that data center because it's all about transactions and all those transactions are happening in a data center so they did not have power in Utah and they needed power the choice was to move somewhere else and they didn't want to move their location so they relied on us so that was our first application of a missionritical data center being powered fully by bloom and we built that reputation over time so couple years ago So there was a data center in Utah that was being built and had to come online for Oracle's customer and the power systems were delayed. So they came to us and said can you give us a temporary solution uh for a year said absolutely and um we signed a contract with them that 90 days from the day we signed the contract we would do 50 plus megawatt which is an unbelievable speed. We delivered that in 55 days instead of 90 days power on and they were thrilled with what they saw. So now uh that formed the basis for them to say why would we go and look for other solutions when we have a great solution that fits the bill. There are so many attributes of the bloom system that are so well done for a data center. Let me give you two or three simple examples so you can understand. If you have a large turbine, let's say it's 500 megawws, one single large turbine powering a 500 megawatt data center, that turbines availability over a 20-year period on a yearly basis will be somewhere in the low 90s, you know, 90%. Because you need to maintain the turbine. It's it's like your jet engine or it's like your car. It has to stop. You have to maintain it. What happens during the other 10%? Are you going to turn down the data center? You can't the data centers be always on. In the past when the data centers were small, you relied on the grid to be the backup. Now there is no grid that is a gigawatt in size that can be backing you up. So what do you have to do? You have to put two turbines instead of one and have one as the backup for for one when one fails or one has to be overhauled. With Bloom, we are tiny modular power builders. Each one 50 kilowatt. So you can hot swap any one when you're working with it. Very similar to how a data center is built. If you look at the architecture of the Bloom system, it's very much like the architecture of the data center. You have so many different server blades and any one server blade going down does not take the data center down. There are so many racks. Any one rack going down does not take the entire data center down. Our architecture is exactly like that. So you don't have to overbuild us by anything more than a small percentage compared to the large turbons. Number one. Number two, we're a solid state device, which means we can ramp up and ramp down in power in milliseconds, which is what the AI loads need. AI loads are like the brain. Just think about it. Our brain goes into huge activity, pulse, lot of energy, then it calms down. The same thing happens in an AI data center with all the GPUs. And think about a turbine. Think think about your car. Even if you have the fastest car, 0 to 60 takes few seconds because a mechanical device that has to ramp up and ramp down. We are a solid state device. It can ramp up and down very fast. So all the batteries that they needed to provide this ramp, they don't need it with Bloom. And then we can scale as you go. You you cannot put a partial turbine to power a data center as it's building and then keep adding turbine blades as the data center is ramping up. With Bloom, it's completely different. just tell me what you need today and as you're growing we'll just keep adding the Lego blocks. So when I tell you that Bloom was purpose-built and purpose designed for the digital infrastructure, it was truly done that way. And the band-aids that you put on the mechanical age infrastructure like turbines and engines simply cannot do that. They saw all these advantages and so it was a fairly easy conversation.
>> You said there about 55 days not 90 and that is one unshot. I mean amazingly done.
>> When does the primary focus for customers move from speed to cost and how price sensitive are customers?
You know with electricity go back to the context we talked about it is the primary input to manufacturing intelligence. At the end of the day when you look at it end to end it's neither price nor cost. It's value. You're you're generating tokens. The token has a value. What's that entire stream look like? And how can you maximize the value? So the reason I'm saying that is the cost of electricity as we used to think when the grid was supplying it because it was a one-sizefits-all electricity. What Bloom makes is designer electricity, right? So the one sizefits-all electricity means that you buy that electricity and then you have to make all the alterations to that one sizefits-all which is all the gear that you put in your data center that you own that you operate that you maintain and those things fail they create reliability issues. You have to deal with all that and all the inefficiency associated with that. With Bloom, we tailor fit exactly what the needs for generating that token are. And the value we create
>> and the benefits from being tailor fitted versus one sizefits-all horizontal is cost for the token generated. the amount of power needed for that and the amount of gas needed for that, the amount of copper needed for that, the amount of other supply chain and tradesmen needed for that.
>> So, it's efficiency, like lack of wastage,
>> entire efficiency. It's an entire stack efficiency, the full vertical stack. It's almost like you are custom designing a furniture for your own home that fits perfectly as opposed to just generic cubes.
>> Your backlog is 20 billion and the manufacturing capacity is a gawatt today.
>> Mhm.
>> What's the manufacturing capacity by the end of this year?
>> We'll be over 2 gawatt. We said that publicly. And what we also said is going forward, we're not just going to just ram from two to a another big step function or whatever, we have made this based on everything we see in the market today. Think of it almost like an analog dial. Every month, every quarter, we're going to keep adding more capacity as we build. So, if you came to our factory, it's a state-of-the-art production facility, but it's also a state-of-the-art construction zone. They're both happening at the same time, and we're able to do that. And it's
A state-of-the-art innovation area where we are innovating on our manufacturing processes so we can make it more efficient as we go forward thanks to AI.
Can what does the scaling trajectory look like? You know one now two end of year end of 27 is that 2 to 10 or is that grossly impossible?
Because we are a public company we have not given forward guidance on that. So I don't feel comfortable giving you a number but but but what we have the promise we have made to our customers and to the market is you come in and put a firm deposit for power before you build your green field data center we'll have that power for you we will not be the bottleneck.
Do you have a um concentration in terms of customers and revenue when you look at when I look at a lot of the biggest businesses today?
Uh no we don't. uh we are signed up with multiple hyperscalers.
Yeah, we are we are signed up with multiple neoclouds. But more importantly, it's not just not having an AI concentration. We have a robust commercial and industrial business. We power factories. We power home depots and costs and Walmarts. We v we power um college campuses. Twothirds of Caltech campus is powered by us. Anybody who needs reliable power should use us.
One thing I'm interested by is you've become famous also in social media circles because of Leo Ashen Brrener and his investment in the company. Have you seen the effect of him being an ambassador on the company in terms of recognition, awareness, employee recognition?
You know, the first time I knew about it was when my, you know, 22 year old daughter showed me that all her friends are talking about it because of social media.
Yeah. And um so uh but I've I've like met him since he's a very sharp deep thinking individual. I think he's got some tremendous ideas of where you know where things are. We obviously agree with this thesis on bloom and uh the impact I think look it's going to come from multiple multiple areas. Uh this is a huge concept. The idea of distributed power coming to the edge is a concept that's going to change dramatically. City planning access the need for people to move from unaccessible area to a metrop you know metropolitan city just so their next generation can have a better life. I don't think that's the way 10 billion people should live on the planet. The only reason So, so let me explain this. The only reason parents will leave their idealic village settings and move into a city and live in poulry conditions. You know, they're willing to compromise their own life so their kids have better access. Why not bring the access right where they live? In a digital age, you can bring all the information, you can bring everything else there. If you brought electricity, I think it changes how the world can think about itself.
So, you think we'll see a change in the red in the distribution of people in cities and countryside and more will remain outside of cities because of the lack of need.
Yeah. If you throughout human history, if you if you look at where people concentrated, it was for access. So anywhere there was a waterway by rivers by the coast is where people settled because waterways were great way to trade and it was access. And then you just look at the large railroads. You look at the the big highways where they intersect is where large cities are or you know that's where access is created. So access was created by people who control and they control where people lived. If you can break that using distributed again going back to true democracy you just democratize things. So any technology coming to the edge democratizes it. Your cell phone today is your personal device with only the things you want. Did the landline telephone ever give you that access? No. That's that's true democracy. Technology bringing true democracy. If you're able to do that with power, it changes geopolitics.
The business has changed a lot in the last two to three years. What have you most significantly changed your mind on in the last two to three years as a result of the incredible parabolic growth that you've seen?
Until the time when this big switch happened, we were a lot more internally focused and uh I did not spend much time talking about the bigger ideas and where where this can ultimately go because it was not the right time to do that. Uh now we feel as a company uh we have a larger mandate than just building the company but to also speak about where the future can be in terms of electricity for all abundance for all. So that's a big shift in my mindset. So I'm spending more time uh speaking about it and talking to people about it.
I would be remiss not to ask this while I have the chance. You mentioned, you know, children talking about it from social media. You know, when I grow up, I want to be UK is the takeaway I have from this conversation. And and with that, you're a CEO of an incredible business. You're also a father. Uh what would be your biggest parenting advice having run a business for 25 years to the you know multi multi multi-billions? What's your biggest lessons and advice on how to do both so well?
Um, I would say if I were, you know, this is what I would tell my kids is I would say be good people and be happy and uh just work on the things you're passionate about.
I would love to do a quick fire. Speaking of passions, I I love this round.
Um, what was your biggest lesson from working with John Door?
Um, to dream big.
What's one widely held belief about AI that you think is completely wrong?
That it is going to diminish the number of jobs.
Who's the most underrated person in the energy transition that doesn't get enough spotlight?
I think the people who created horizontal drilling and figured out how to extract more gas and more oil in a clear way as a bridge to the future. uh that entire sector is underrated.
Which country is set up best to be a powerhouse in the next decade?
I think it's still the US. Is Europe slightly screwed? I think Europe is waking up faster than I would have expected because of AI. And I'm optimistic hearing both from the EU and UK about the changes they want to make. The key is going to be can they really make the changes fast enough?
If you had unlimited money as a business, what would you do that you're not doing today?
We would be going to the rest of the world uh where they don't have the upfront money and capital to buy our boxes and our infrastructure and putting that in and collecting later from the once they benefit from it.
Hm, that's interesting. How able are you to move at speed into Asia?
Uh, we are very well prepared to move anywhere in the world today, but it'll be a very focused effort and when we go to other countries, we'll always look for a partner in the country.
What do you think about a lot about, but you don't ever see it or see it often in the news?
Creating more equal access. Equity is different, but creating access is important. Giving everybody an opportunity is super important to me. Uh what they make of that opportunity is up to them.
25 years. What was the hardest time?
Uh it was post financial crisis. We had built a completely US supply chain and because the big three automotives had failed. uh they were all not able to um keep their promises to me because we were just a development company at that time and I had to within months find a plan B for what is a strong plan A 6 years in the making and uh it was a very difficult time to get through that.
Penultimate one. What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?
I was in China in a remote part. I had a bad accident where I was I could have easily bled to death and I was driven to the hospital and uh he was in a remote town. So through my translator with few seconds left or of my consciousness I was like get me a helicopter get me to Hong Kong and I don't know the name of the doctor but I vaguely remember his face in that state telling to the interpreter ask him to shut up I'm going to stitch him up otherwise his body will be flown to Hong Kong and he and he stitched me up and uh when When I look back, uh, that was a very kind thing that he did for me, not listening to me.
Wow, that changes some perspective. Um, final one for you. What are you most excited about when you look forward to the next 10 years? I like to end on a theme of positivity. I think there's too much negativity in the world. What are you most excited for?
I truly believe we will look back at this huge hunger for power that AI created and the most wealthy companies in the world wanting to get ahead being the single most important reason for us to figure out digital power for the dig for the digital world and creating abundance of power that's not in conflict with the environment and making it affordable that ultimately there is no energy poor country that's economically rich. If we create energy abundance, we create economic abundance and that lifts all boards everywhere. So, I'm super excited about that opportunity and I almost have trouble sleeping when I think about what a what a brilliant world that can be.
Ken, I've so loved doing this. Thank you so much for being so wonderfully thoughtful, uh, brilliant, artistic with storytelling. You've been amazing. So, I so appreciate it. Thank you so much.