This is the long-awaited Energy Stack episode. The AI trade is shifting from GPUs to the power, wiring, and data center infrastructure needed to support them. Today, we cover Bloom Energy, optical networking companies like Lumentum and Corning, Marvell’s role in AI hardware, and neocloud providers such as Nebius, CoreWeave, and IREN. ------ 🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️ NEWSLETTER: https://limitlessft.substack.com/ FOLLOW ON X: https://x.com/LimitlessFT SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQ APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890 RSS FEED: https://limitlessft.substack.com/ ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 GPU Bottleneck Shifts 0:37 Power Becomes the Constraint 3:15 Five-Year Grid Delays 5:47 Bloom’s Fast Energy Fix 9:54 Data Transfer Hits Limits 11:51 Light Replaces Copper 17:25 Power Delivery Gets Harder 18:22 Marvell Wins Power Design 20:35 Renting Compute at Scale 21:08 Nebius and NeoClouds 25:17 Compute Becomes an Asset 29:47 The Substrate Layer Ahead ------ RESOURCES Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

The AI Energy Stack: The Actual Industry Winners

Limitless: An AI Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Limitless: An AI Podcast

## Participants

- **Josh** (Limitless)
- **Ejaz** (Limitless)

## Transcript

For three years, the AI trade has been one simple idea. Buy the chips. NVIDIA became the most valuable company on Earth by making these chips and they've made countless of investors rich because of this. But this investment thesis now has become overcrowded. Not because AI is slowing down but because there's another problem that has surfaced. No one can turn these GPUs on. Trillions of dollars being spent in AI and all these GPUs are collecting dust in data centers. The problem? Energy, electrical grids, wiring, networking, the transfer.

Transformers, the web of infrastructure that sits around a GPU that allows it to keep alive, to talk to each other, to transmit petabytes of data between each other. This is the next constraint that hasn't been solved yet and where the majority of the AI capital will eventually flow. Now there's four physical things that keep a chip alive, essentially. The power to run it, the light to transmit all the data between them, the silicon wiring between them all, and then somewhere to rent it all from. And almost nobody is really talking about this. And on this episode, we're going to unpack that specific layer of data.

The infrastructure stack, the power layer, and why it's so important going forward in terms of capital. Yeah, and this may feel a little bit different because we're always talking about whose model is the smartest. That's the common conversation. But once you strip away all that abstraction, a token is really just what is output. And that is just a series of electrons flowing through chips, light flowing through fiber, and then heat being pulled out of the system. And all of that requires a lot of energy and electricity.

The money cycle that we're going to talk about has kind of flowed towards this direction as well. I mean, everyone started with the crowded GPU trade, then it flowed to the semis that exist around them, then it flowed to the memory trade.

And now it's kind of moving over to the seemingly the endgame bottleneck, which is energy. I mean, US data power center demand, I think is projected to roughly double 80 gigawatts in 2026 to 150 by 2028. So the grid's just not really built for that. And there's no shortage of demand for that.

And when we think about energy as an idea, even if you believe that the AI bubble is towards the latter end of it, energy is still something that's not going away. We had energy problems prior to the LLM becoming a big deal from the chat GPT moment. This is just an extension and an exaggeration on top of that. And it creates a lot of interesting opportunities in the marketplace to actually participate in this bottleneck that is now known as I guess we call it the energy bottleneck.

Yeah. And I think a lot of the reason why people don't talk about this is because it's sort of unsexy, you know, not everyone is an electrical g...

The AI Energy Stack: The Actual Industry Winners

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

The AI Energy Stack: The Actual Industry Winners

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.