Can today&#x27;s power grid handle the explosive growth of AI data centers? Tesla Alum Drew Baglino, now founder &amp; CEO of Heron Power, doesn&#x27;t think so. In this episode, he joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why scaling compute requires a fundamental overhaul of grid-to-chip infrastructure, not just bigger power plants. They cover how Heron Power raised $140M to cut power losses in half, shrink massive oil-filled transformers by 100x, and unlock 35MW of extra compute for every gigawatt data center, and what that means for the future of AI energy efficiency. Connect with us here: Drew Baglino Heron Power Lukas Biewald Weights and Biases

Elon's Former Battery Chief: AI Data Centers Will Make Electricity Cheaper

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

That's actually what a data center is. You take a gigawatt of power and you convert it into 700 megawatts of heat. You spend 300 megawatts to get that heat into the atmosphere. I guess presumably your transformer is going to be more efficient than the 10% loss? We can reduce the loss from grid to chip by about a factor of two. Our core first product, the Heron Link, the transformer part is 100 times smaller. You still need to go through an isolation stage when you're going from like a high voltage grid to like a computer. So you need to galvanically isolate.

But rather than doing it at 60 hertz, which is how we do it today, we can do it at hundreds of kilohertz because these devices I'm talking about can switch so fast. So it's a material science thing. You're trying to find materials that can block more voltage or more thermally conductive because the semiconductor is either conducting or not. And there's a bajillion transistors in a GPU and a power device has one. Right, right. But it's one like highly engineered device. And what silicon carbide is doing is allowing you not to make like a one volt transistor like you have in a GPU, but like you can make a 10,000 volt transistor.

And it is actually smaller than the GPU. So we have the loss. So for somebody building like a gigawatt data center, it means they can get 35 megawatts more useful compute app. Okay, so why did California power rates go up? There's like a lot of weird reasons. One is... You're listening to Gradient Dissent, a show about making machine learning work in the real world. And I'm your host, Lukas Biewald.

Elon's Former Battery Chief: AI Data Centers Will Make Electricity Cheaper

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Elon's Former Battery Chief: AI Data Centers Will Make Electricity Cheaper

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.