These companies were largely built around the winning assets of the previous energy system: oil fields, refineries, pipelines, tankers, centralized generation, poles, and wires. The energy transition that's been underway has already created new bottlenecks – the grid struggles matching variable supply with unpredictable demand, for example – and therefore new valuable positions. Then the most ravenous consumer of electrons in history entered the market in the form of data centers.
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Even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity, almost all of the world's demand is being served by a very few select locations. So you can still have this issue where you're basically powering the entire um world's AI demand from a few centers in the US and and and a few other data centers across the world. And that's a really really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.
The Prof G Pod
Martin believes this may be the biggest unlock of wealth he's seen since the 1990s.
The a16z Show
why he thinks it would be dangerous for the United States to win the AI race outright, what container shipping and the railroads of the 1870s tell us about the buildout, and why the binding constraint on all of this may be capital rather than compute.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy