Frontier Forum: The new power map for AI infrastructure

As AI reshapes the industrial landscape, companies are questioning whether the grid can keep pace. Permitting delays, transmission constraints, and reliability risks are forcing developers to rethink where power comes from. In this episode, KR Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy, lays out a radically different vision. He believes that many data centers will ultimately operate like refineries — powered by captive, off-grid generation that prioritizes resilience, speed, and local control over traditional grid economics. Sridhar argues that solid-state fuel cells have become an ideal solution to meet data center needs at AI speed and scale. They can be deployed in months rather than years, follow digital loads in real time, and integrate with future zero-carbon fuels like hydrogen. “I truly believe that this is a cyclical trend that’s going to continue for well over a decade,” said Sridhar. This episode features an edited version of our live Frontier Forum conversation about what a future-proof AI power strategy really looks like. We talk about the tension between off-grid and grid-connected approaches, the importance of speed to power, carbon capture, and supply chains over the next decade of growth. The conversation also touches on Bloom’s new white paper, Fuel Cells: A Technology Whose Time Has Come, which argues that onsite generation can deliver AI-scale reliability and lower emissions. You can watch the full Frontier Forum conversation with audience Q&A here.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is a Frontier Forum, brought to you by Latitude Studios.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  There's a lot of debate about where exactly data center electricity demand is headed. But we know it's steeply up and could account for more than 10% of US demand in the next few years. That's up from 2% a couple of years ago.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  That's an unbelievable leap. And that leap, really, if the US has to stay in the AI race, has to happen in the next four to five years.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  K R Sridhar is the CEO of fuel cell maker Bloom Energy. About a third of the company's solid oxide fuel cells are sited at data centers. We're talking hundreds of megawatts with that number growing quickly. So K R knows the industry well, and he's never seen anything like the current AI infrastructure boom.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  It's the speed and the scale. I truly believe that this is a circular trend that's going to continue for well over a decade.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Data centers are now being planned and built faster than the electricity system can handle. That has sparked another debate about the role of onsite generation and whether data centers will be built off-grid. Now, some folks argue that co-located, behind-the-meter resources will be rare, and that the smartest economic move for data centers will be to connect to the grid, not walk away from it. K R believes deeply in the importance of the grid, but he also thinks that onsite solutions, including fuel cells, will be critical for building infrastructure at the pace of AI expansion.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  What the centralized power plants and the electric grid did to humanity in the 20th century is nothing but unbelievably amazing. That model still has a place because electricity is the ultimate perishable, and having that large flywheel called the grid is very important. So it's an "and" and not an "or." However, when you go to data centers, here's what happens.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  There are many misalignments between data centers and the grid. A data center consumes DC power, the grid sends AC power. And the quality of the power on the electricity system, which shifts depending on loads turning on and off and changes to the generation mix, is not anywhere near what a data center can accept.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  What do you do? You put all these Band-Aids, make it high-quality using UPS quality power. Step it down from high voltage to medium voltage to low voltage. All the transformers, all the power conversion devices, they're all Band-Aids because they are taking a mechanical age electricity and trying to adapt it to a digital age computer.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  A fuel cell is a solid-state power device that K R says is purpose-built for a digital facility like a data center. He compares today's power strategies to trying to build a faster horse and buggy when we really need a car for the AI era.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  When you use Bloom, you have a one-step process. When you use a conventional combustion technology, you use a six-step process. The horse is consuming a lot of water, it's consuming a lot of hay and a lot of other things to walk the mile. We consume very little to walk that mile.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I'm Stephen Lacy. In this week, we have a conversation with Bloom Energy CEO K R Shridhar about rapidly changing power strategies for data centers. This conversation was recorded live as part of Latitude Media's Frontier Forum series. The data center industry is investing trillions in infrastructure while up against permitting timelines and grid constraints. I talked with K R about customer pain points, the unique power demands of AI data centers, and why onsite generation will be critical for winning the AI race.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  So we did a survey two years ago and now. And 18 months ago, the survey respondents said, 1% of the survey respondents said they will use onsite power that is not connected to the grid. Two months ago, when we did the same survey, twenty-nine percent of the respondents said they will use onsite power without being connected to the grid. So sentiment is changing enormously, simply because of lack of availability of the power and understanding that we have to use this. So this AI movement is forcing data centers to finally say the digital age needs digital

• 4:25Speaker 02

  electrons coming from a digital source. I think, once they get used to this and understand all the advantages of this digitally purpose-built onsite power, they are not going to switch back.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Let me take the other side of that. I think that people who believe that most of these data centers will be grid-connected would say the grid offers scale and optionality that no off-grid system could potentially match. It's much more cost-effective. You have to overbuild the system for an off-grid data center. And that there's a lot of grid capacity left, that you just now need to get creative to unlock that grid capacity. What do you say to those arguments about why off-grid data centers may not blossom in the way that you're painting?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  I'm going to surprise you by saying that I would agree with those arguments for a very simple reason. If you have excess capacity in the grid, and you can get that without putting that on your balance sheet, why would you be stupid enough to put that on your balance sheet and take that responsibility yourself? Absolutely, yes. That's exactly what all the data centers have been doing so far. But here is why. The Commons, which is the US taxpayer and the US government, built this excess capacity in the grid that was paid for by the ratepayers, one way or another, either through taxes or through their bills. That grid has excess, had excess capacity, so the data centers were able to use it.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Now, if the grid were to build excess capacity purely to meet this huge demand...

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And expects the taxpayer to pay for it so the hyperscaler can benefit. That politics is never going to fly. So the, so the idea that somehow data centers will go and build their own onsite power. If the grid were available is a fallacy. The notion that the grid, the commons, will somehow build all this capacity. So one or two users can use all that capacity at the expense of everybody else. Is also a political wish, which I don't think will happen in reality.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And then what about just speed in general? How much is speed to power, the phrase of the moment? How much is that going to drive the off-grid approach?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  That is going to be the key. The truth is, this is a true race. It's a race between corporations trying to get supremacy. It's a race between the Western world and the like rest of the world, competing for AI supremacy. One thing that everybody will agree is being number two or number three is not an option. Speed is going to be everything. And there, it's just simple knowledge for people who understand the grid. That you cannot build the grid at that speed, no matter what you did. You know, the common refrain is if only permitting and permissions go away. Okay, yes, that is a big, large issue.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  But imagine somebody waves a magic wand, you know, like Wand, the king. And I can build high voltage transmission lines running straight over your house and you have no right to object to it. So what? What's the amount of copper needed? What's the amount of transformers needed? What are the lead times for it? Where are you going to get that from? Where are the skill sets to build these things? How much capital is required? How fast will that happen? Realistically, over a five, six, seven year period, it cannot catch up with the demand base that exists out there. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't upgrade the grid. That's why I started off saying the grid has a very important place.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  It's an all of the above strategy. We should be investing heavily in optimizing the grids, the things that you talked about. Can we use AI to make the grid better and extract more out of less, right? Can we make it more efficient? Can we figure out other ways of optimizing it? Can we add more transmission? Can we add, you know, better technologies to remove the bottlenecks where they exist? And get more out of the grid? The answer is yes. But is that the solution? No, it is part of a solution.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Tell me about what other industries you look to where this could, where this is a model? Are there large industrial loads that you see that have accomplished this?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  You know, when I look around, there is not a single industry that builds factories that have very high power demands that doesn't have captive power. Okay, let me walk you through it. You take metals, whether it's a steel mill or it's aluminum. If you go to an Alkova plant in Indiana, they'll have a captive power plant that's a few hundred megawatts. Because that kind of load, they cannot depend on the grid. If they were to do a shutdown for maintenance and you suddenly drop hundred megawatts to two hundred megawatts off the grid, what happens to the grid? You cannot do that. It has to be captive power. You go to cement, large cement plants, wholesome. If you go and look at it, they will have their captive power plants.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  But then you go to refineries, same thing. But here is what happens. Here is another reason why they do it. It's not just because the load is so large. You know, number one, you get the reliability and resiliency you need when you have a captive power plant and not when you depend on the grid. These are continuous processes. If they shut down for whatever reasons that happen in the grid, that cost of in-process inventory, everything is too high, right? Number one, reliability and resiliency. Number two, there are synergies that come from keeping that captive power plant right where you use the power.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Here's why. A refinery, for example, will use the offgases that are coming out as a fuel into their power plant, and they can get better economics. A steel mill, a cement plant, same thing. Then you look at paper mills. Paper mills do the same thing. You go and look at chemicals, pharmaceuticals. It's the same. Anywhere you've seen an extremely large load in a factory, it's a cap two power plant. We are finally building high electricity intensity AI factories. These are, these data centers are AI factories. They have been the exception and not the rule. They are now going to have to follow the rule.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  So I definitely take your point for the all of the above approach. And you know, you've said that this is not a winner take all market. So if we apply that to the actual groupings of onsite technologies for these data centers, what do you expect to see when we look at fuel cells, gas turbines, renewables, eventually nuclear? How do you imagine them all fitting together? What kind of system designs are you currently seeing?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  These are, you know, it'll be all of the above. It'll be all of the above and more, okay? New things that come along. And so what I would say is, microgrids supporting such infrastructure will definitely have a multiplicity of generation sources. Each one comes with very different attributes. And you may need particular attributes depending on what your end need is. So as, as soon as you start purpose building for your needs, you're going to exactly tailor it for the needs that you have. And so you can imagine for some extremely peak loads, there being some engines or turbines.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  For a steady base load, there being a fuel cell because we'll be the most efficient from a fuel perspective and not create pollution. Zero pollution, right? Air pollution. That's super important for an AI factory because unlike a refinery, unlike a cement plant, which can be, which will by definition only be located far away, and inherently they create so. Much pollution that having just a captive power add to that pollution is de minimis. Unlike that, AI factory being built in a population center, especially for inference, cannot afford to have air pollution. So that becomes an extremely important aspect.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Then you got the load swinging up and down. For that, you're going to have a variety of storage technologies from batteries to flywheels to ultra caps to super caps. They will all become part of the microgrid. And how you adapt it, what particular technologies you use will depend exactly on what kind of a data center it is, what does its load profile look like? And it has to be tailored and met perfectly. So I think we are in the dawn of a reimagining electricity and how it is delivered to a customer.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that brings me to another question. It's kind of a two-part question. One was on the differences between training and inference workloads. And is it possible that there is even more upside to growth than we previously thought?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Uh, based on historical data, including our conventional CPU data centers. And if you go back to any form of human use of a new technology, a new tool, what you see in history is while things start in a very centralized fashion far away, ultimately, the value is only created and the growth comes when that technology comes to the edge, closer to where people are, closer to where machines are, closer to where people are. And that is the predominant use. That applies to computing, that applies to, you know, telephony, that applies to, you know, everything else. So what do I mean by that?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Today, most of the AI load we are all focused on and are talking about is the hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt kind of a data center for training. While the total capacity of that will keep increasing over the next eight to 10 years. In terms of percentages, while today the training is 90% of the AI load and 10% is inference, or somewhere in that neighborhood, three to four years from now, I predict that 90% of the load will be inference and 10% will be training, even though the 10% in training then will be significantly larger than the 90% training today. That's what I mean by proportionality. They'll both grow, but proportionally this way it'll be.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  The inference data centers for AI, unlike the CPU data centers of today that are 1 to 10 megawatts typically on the edge, are going to be somewhere between 5 to 30 megawatts on the edge. So if you live in Austin, if you live in Dallas, if you live in Chicago, if you live in Manhattan, if there are 100 inference data centers that need to come that need 10 to 30 megawatts of load, God bless you if you went to your local utility and asked them for that load and they're able to provide that to you. If you thought transmission was a problem, wait till you figure out what distribution is. That's the surface streets, right? Transmission is your highways. If you, if you think the highway is congested, wait till you get to the surface streets

• 15:51Speaker 02

  to see what the surface streets are doing, right? So you need onsite power for that. So I completely agree with Arman that that's going to be a huge growth area. And the beauty of our technology, which is modular, scalable, with no compromise in efficiency or performance or reliability, whether you do it in 5 megawatt chunks, or 50 megawatt chunks, or 500 megawatt chunks.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  That advantage that we bring again is the car unlike the horse.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  What are the other pain points you're seeing from customers when it comes to power supply and delivery? Are there any others that we haven't touched on that you think are particularly acute?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yes, the data center customers, the AI practitioners know this extremely well. The AI load, unlike the CPU load, is very volatile. It has milliseconds, seconds, and minutes variation that go from 10% of a load to 100% of the load. So you're talking about, if it's 100 megawatt data center as an example, you're talking about the load swinging from 10 megawatts to 100 megawatts up and down. And some of those variations happen in millisecond frequency. Some of them happen in seconds frequency, some in minutes frequency.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  And the amount of backend Band-Aids that they are putting to deal with this, as well as the harmonics it creates because of converting AC to DC, have all become very large pain points, number one. With our architecture of being able to provide DC, it becomes easier. That's one pain point. The second pain point that they are working on as we speak is shifting the mindset to an 800 volt DC bus going into Iraq. Let me explain this to you.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  When you are a large power plant that produces 50 megawatts, 500 megawatts worth of power, because so much power comes out, and think of it as a pipe, the wire is a pipe. Think of water flowing in it and think of the total power coming in as the amount of water, the mass of water coming out. You can either increase the pressure or increase the diameter to increase the flow. Because copper gets very large if you keep it at low voltage, they only bring it out at high voltage. You have to convert them all. And that process in our system is completely obviated because we can natively provide eight hundred volt DC. Going to the grid. We think that's where the world will go.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  So that's a huge thing that is a pain point, but we have an elegant solution to solve that problem. The third pain point that they see is cooling. Uh, the amount of cooling load necessitates that it's a liquid cooling. That has to happen in the data center racks. And there again, we have an elegant solution for them.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  So when we look at the needs of customers, what they're looking for, do you see any tension between the speed to power and sustainability goals? And do they have any concerns about a gas strategy?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I would say for pretty much all the data center operators today. The sustainability goal has shifted from being in the top three to being in the bottom three. However, if you offered them a pathway to, I can give you the quick power today. But I can future proof you and I can give you add-ons that get you to net zero. Or extremely low carbon footprint. They're super interested. They still want to do it, but they will not do it at the expense of waiting for power. Okay, that's where that's where the sentiment is. That's where Bloom plays really well.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Because we consume less fuel with natural gas, we have a lower carbon footprint compared to any other onsite generation technology. And without natural gas, we are we are not going to be able to power the AI revolution. That's a fact. Okay, that's a fact. And so we are lower comfort. However, because of the uniqueness of our technology and your viewers can go watch that on our website. There's a very good explanation of carbon capture. We put out a very clean stream of carbon dioxide coming out. So the our users can capture the carbon dioxide coming out of our system and sequester it. And I think the world will get to that place very soon. So that's one way of zero carbon.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Should a green molecule become available in the future? Hydrogen, ammonia, RNG, biogas, you name it. And it'd be available in large quantities. Our systems are already pre-wired for that. You don't even have to tell us. You can feed that gas in and we will happily accept it and produce electricity. So we are future-proofed. So in other words, think of us as we are giving you a 5G phone now, even though you don't have 5G in your neighborhood, but you don't have to wait for 5G to come to your neighborhood to use it. You can be using your LTE or 3G right now. And when 5G comes, it automatically switches over. Our systems are built for a zero-carbon molecule.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  But that molecule, when it comes, the customer can switch, but they don't have to wait for it to come.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh. And I remember when Bloom first emerged, there was a lot of talk about the potential of using green hydrogen in these fuel cells. And you know, hydrogen, green hydrogen has been very difficult and expensive. There's limited supply. And you talked about carbon capture, this partnership with Chart Industries, I believe.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Which comes first? Carbon capture at scale or green hydrogen?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Carbon capture at scale, hands down, for electricity generation. So it depends on what you're asking for, right? The green hydrogen going into green ammonia, coming from certain places, going to produce fertilizers and other hard-to-abate industries, that would make sense. It would not make sense to make a green ammonia and use that for electricity generation, because the world is short on electricity. Green hydrogen is produced by bottling electricity. Why would you bottle something when you have current shortage? You don't save money if you can't feed yourself today.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Who is asking for a carbon capture? Are they corporate customers with sustainability goals? Are there other reasons? Is it primarily the folks who have clean energy targets and are now burning more gas?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Look, I think most corporations want to be responsible. You know, nobody, you know, I can't, you know, I've not met a CEO yet who's waking up in the morning saying, "I want to add to climate change." Okay? That's, that's not the goal of any corporation. So when we tell them that we have this solution, they say as long as... Yet meets the economics. You know, they're willing to pay a premium. As long as it meets the economics and it can be within scale. If you don't slow me down, I'm willing to buy that solution from you. That we have heard across the board from everybody. Across the board from everybody. So what we are seeing is every data center customer is super interested in our carbon capture solution.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  If they are deploying that solution in a region where the geology is suitable for sequestration, they're all interested. Now, what they also want is speed. And the solution we offer is carbon capture and sequestration is a bolt on to our technology. We will provide you the power with the lowest carbon footprint today. Two years from now, when everything else is ready and available, like the classic wells, all the pumping, all the technology we chart, ready to be implemented, we will bolt that on for you. And they're very happy to sign on to a solution like that.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  We are, of course, in a wildly different trade environment now. And I know that you had worked over the years to move your supply chain away from China. Can you talk about your advantages and any risks you have in your supply chain currently? And, you know, are any of the major policy changes changing the way you're procuring materials and equipment?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  So when I started Bloom 24 years ago, the idea was very simple, right? Centralized systems with centralized directive managed by very few is a command and control, communistic kind of approach. The distributor is democracy. So we were building a democratic electrical system with a distributed system. That's, that was our objective. So for that reason, that thought process permeated through everything we did. We said, we want to build a supply chain where no one single region can solely choke a supply chain for growth.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  So we only pick materials, we only pick processes, we only pick supply chain partners, as long as we could geographically diversify across the board and not create any tensions in that system, because the goal of the company was one day to be able to provide this around the world and create energy abundance. It was built at the very last eagle. So, so therefore, we set it up that way and never constrained ourselves to any one country from the day we started. Today, when we look back, that was a very good strategy. From a where the world is going and the interdependence and that interdependence

• 25:42Speaker 02

  becomes unhealthy if that interdependence is on only one person and it's a one way. That's not interdependence anymore. And, and we don't have that, number one. Number two, the question you asked, unlike other energy generation technologies, uh, if you take turbines as a class, engines as a class, you go to the second, third tier suppliers, you will find common bottlenecks. Unless that second, third tier is able to grow, the rest of them can't grow. It'll, it's, it's only a matter of allocation of between the people who consume it, who's going to get more and who's going to get less, even as they grow.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  We, we are decoupled from that supply chain because of the completely different way that our technology works, right? And if you think of copper and transformers and things like that, because we natively produce DC power at the right voltage, we are just eliminating the need for a lot of those materials that are in short supply. So if you're trying to take the limited amount of materials available and say, where can I get the most bang for my buck? You will see that our technology and our supply chain and how we think about that entire value stream will provide a lot more power with the same amount of copper compared to any other technology.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Hmm. And are you seeing sufficient gas pipeline capacity?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Uh, the gas pipelines and the availability of gas is there. In fact, as you very well know, we are exporting a lot of LNG out of the country. So clearly we have excess of that. Now, in terms of the pipeline coming to exactly where your location is, from the medium pressure pipeline to the last mile distribution, there could be, you know, issues there in that, uh, there in terms of adding that infrastructure. Depending on what state you live in, it can be a matter of weeks or it can be a matter of years. You know, if you, if you, if you happen to live in New York City or the state of New York, uh, you know, two years ago, where it was completely anti-pipeline.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  That would be very hard to get, but in other states, it's very easy to get. But I think that's all changing. That attitude is changing, getting to reality of this is the cleanest way we can do it. And better cannot be the enemy of good.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Hmm. Let's talk about customers a little bit. You've deployed a lot of capacity with customers like Equinix and AEP. You've been to deal with Oracle to deliver onsite fuel cells for cloud data centers in, I think, only 90 days. If that's right.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  And that's unthinkable when we think about traditional grid connections. What are customers asking for? Are they currently supplementing with grid power? Or are they truly looking for these onsite off-grid solutions?

• 28:35Speaker 02

  All of the above. Anytime a customer can connect to a grid, they would want to. And we would recommend that they connect to the grid because that's insurance for almost nothing. Why would you not take it? You know, it's an option. Why would you not take it, right? So wherever the grid is available, even if we are primary power and we have all the reliability, it costs almost nothing compared to the entire data center spend to be able to get that, you know, connection. But when that connection is not available, our solution offers a highly reliable option where they can go without it compared to any other solution out there. So there are customers. So today, I would say we have a mix of both.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Traditionally, over the last few years, if you looked at it, even though we were the primary source, even though we were mission critical, in many cases, they were connected to the grid. But we have an example, 2013, when we did eBay, of having run that data center without losing power even once for over a 10-year period of islanded solution where we were the only solution. The grid was connected, but it didn't have the capacity that they needed. Bloom offered that capacity. So for us, islanded mode, that's what the system was designed for. It's very easy. It's not an afterthought.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I want to turn now to the actual use of AI to model and optimize these systems. Can you talk about how you're using AI for digital twins? And what that does to the actual performance of the systems? And how you're modeling them at these large data center sites?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  That's a great question. So. If you just think about how we planned it, and when we look back, we're actually very happy that we did it that way. Each one of our Lego block modules, I'm sure your, you know, like viewers have seen what a Bloom power module looks like. They they look like big refrigerators. They produce about, you know, sixty five kilowatts. And there are sixty four little fuel cell stacks sitting inside. Think of them as your chips. Every chip is wired and is providing its health data regularly to us, wherever in the world it is. That's how we did it from the day we shipped our first system in two thousand eight.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  So our fifteen hundred megawatts or one point five gigawatts worth of installed base is shipping us billions of data every day on how it's performing. Very lately, we started calling them digital twins because the world, you know, the world created that terminology. So we have a digital twin for every fuel cell stack that goes in every system, feeding us data. We used heuristics and machine learning and other knowledge to be able to extract and learn from it, and that was part of our innovation cycle. Every system we installed was also a lab experiment for us, giving us data, allowing us to learn and become better. We are a learning organization.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Now, look at what AI has done. With that data today, not only can we learn what is working and make something better, we can probably real time manage the performance of each one of those little refrigerators, slightly different from the next one, just customized for what it can do and extract more out of it. I think it's a phenomenal opportunity, and we are all over it.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I want to go back to the urgency that you expressed earlier about why we need to do everything we can to dominate the AI race. Talk about the consequences of not scaling fast enough. How do you see the US stacking up globally? And, you know, what are the positive outcomes if we can get this right?

• 32:28Speaker 02

  So. When you look at the AI race, it's not just about intelligence and information and number of rote manual processes we do today that can be automated and therefore improve productivity. If you just take that productivity gain alone, we can improve our GDP growth by a couple percentage points. Right? That would mean, you know, thousands of dollars in the pockets of every average American, every average person that lives out there. So economically, just imagine what it creates from a GDP growth and the trillions of dollars it puts into our economy and what does.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  So that's one simple way to think about it. The next thing to think about is not just business processes, but we are living in a sensor ubiquitous world. Every physical device has sensors today, and it's affordable to put these sensors, IoT, right? The ability to use IoT properly using physical AI and how to make everything perform better, become more predictable, last longer, changes every aspect of every industry. Whoever wins this race is going to dominate in manufacturing, is going to dominate in materials processing,

• 33:56Speaker 02

  is going to dominate then using all that information in the speed of R and D for any future technology. So I think your viewers will agree that if we lose our technology superiority, we will lose our economic superiority. That hinges on AI. Now take another layer, national security. Wars are going to be fought and won by AI superiority, not by boots on the ground superiority. So it's a national security issue. It's an economic prosperity issue. It's about who controls the numbers issue. Now, the world pretty much is between a free world and a not free world. Who wins this race is going to dictate

• 34:40Speaker 02

  which way the rest of the world is going to be dominated by. And that's a scary thought if you think we can be number two. It's absolutely scary to me that we can be number two. So that's where I would say, policy notwithstanding.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter who is in Congress, who's in White House. There'll be one thing that every government is going to agree is we cannot afford to not win the AI race.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  K R Shridhar is the CEO of Bloom Energy. What a moment we are in. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Thank you. It was a pleasure.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  K R Shridhar is the CEO of Bloom Energy. To learn more about how fuel cells and onsite power can help your business stay ahead, read Bloom's 2025 white paper by clicking the link in the show notes. And to find out more about how Bloom is bringing fast, reliable power to data centers in the AI era, go to BloomEnergy.com. This is an edited version of a frontier forum recorded in front of a virtual audience. We took lots of live questions from the audience and there's a ton of technical detail on Bloom's fuel cells. So if you want to go deeper, you can click the link in the show notes to watch the full video at LatitudeMedia.com/events.