WATCH LIVE: Elon Musk, David Sacks speak at G20 technology meeting in North Carolina | USA | America

It's obvious that technology is the biggest potential unlock, and if we can get the systems in place to allow that technology to be developed and ultimately to flourish, I think we'll all benefit. So again, I think it's something we should all be proud of, and I just wanted to thank everyone for your good work on that.

Amazing.

So, our first speaker is Elon Musk. As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon has shown that conquering challenges of physics and engineering can be easier than cutting through red tape. And I think his dedication to doing both, however, continues to inspire people around the world. So thank you, Elon, for joining us. We were just wrapping up our introductory session where we made clear that under this presidency, we believe that economic growth is one of the most important drivers for all of us, and we believe that technology is a big piece of that. So you've been on the front lines of this for quite a while, and I think one of the key questions for the group and something that we wanted to talk to you about was, as you have driven innovation across multiple countries around the world, what in your opinion separates countries where innovators can successfully turn breakthroughs into deployed technologies from those where progress actually stalls? Because I think there's a lot of lessons learned about what governments should be doing and what maybe they shouldn't be.

One question that a lot of the countries here face is a question around adoption. I think there's a general recognition that adopting emerging technologies can be very beneficial to economic growth, no matter what sort of shape or size of any country is. How do you think about adoption? What should countries be doing to encourage adoption? Does it go back to the same sort of regulatory structures, or how do you think about adoption as a key driver for growth?

These are mind-boggling numbers.

Yeah, I was just about to say that. One of the stats we gave to the group here was that in the four years since ChatGPT was launched, I think there's over a billion people around the world already using AI. I guess the question to you is, I think a lot of people think about the next chapter being in this sort of applied or physical AI. Where do you see robotics trending? How quickly is it going to be implemented? I think I remember in the first Trump administration we were talking about automated factories, and now we're a year later, 10 years later. So how quickly do you think these changes are happening in the physical AI world?

Wow.

Wow. So shifting gears just a little bit to a question that's kind of facing the US today. Data centers have been a big political issue over the last 6 to 8 months here in the United States. And I think there's a general understanding that in order to drive and power the AI revolution that's coming, we need to have the electricity and the data center compute capacity to do the training and the inference of all this AI. How do you think about this particular issue? Where are we on the curve of how much we've built versus how much we need? And as government leaders here think about how to prepare their economies and build the right power and data infrastructure, how should they be thinking about where compute and power needs are going to be in the next few years?

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time. It meant a lot that you could join us here and really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Great. Now we'll be hearing from David Sacks as a former White House AI SAR and my co-chair on the President's Council of Advisers for Science and Technology. He's a successful investor and I think David understands intimately the importance of regulatory clarity and certainty for the development of new industries built on emerging technologies. So I think he's going to join us in a second.

There we go.

Hey Michael.

Amazing. Great to see you David. How are you?

Good. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well we're excited to have you here. I think you and I have worked together for a while now on ensuring that the US can continue to be a home of great innovation, technological discovery. I think the kind of opening question for you, and just to set the stage a little, the core theme that the president is driving for G20 is a return to growth and how all of us as G20 economies can think about growth as a north star, and particularly for this meeting, how technology can be a driver of that growth. So I guess the opening question for you is, when you think about the policy conditions that need to be in place to allow innovators to innovate, to invest, to experiment, to bring new technologies to market, how should all of these ministers here be thinking about that? What are the types of regulatory conditions we should have in place in our countries?

Well, I think first of all, we do have an AI boom going on in the United States. I mean the AI boom is already here and I think this is a very positive thing and something that we should be trying to nurture as opposed to hamstring. Just a couple of quick numbers on this is that roughly $800 billion is being invested in the US this year on capex related to building out the infrastructure for AI, the compute capacity, and that number is expected to be $1.4 trillion next year. And every time I see the numbers, they keep getting revised up. We really haven't seen a buildout of this kind of infrastructure. You have to go all the way back to the railroads in the 1800s to see something of equal scale. It's actually even bigger than the fiber buildout of the internet. It's a new industrial revolution. And I think that if we harness this correctly, it's an opportunity for the US to re-industrialize, to upgrade its power grid, to bring back some manufacturing in these cutting edge areas, which has been a priority of President Trump. But obviously, I think it's also something that all the other countries of the world can benefit as well if they lean into it.

Yeah. I think one of the things that is covered in our Carolina principles is thinking about the policy environment that we can set up to support innovation, and I think we have quite a diverse set of members in the G20 who think about how to approach regulation in kind of unique ways that can ultimately support their people. When you think about how as tech ministers we should be thinking about the regulatory construct, are there general sort of lessons in the types of things we should be thinking that the government should be working more on or less, or what is your general advice or thoughts on broad tech regulation?

Well, I think when we talk about AI regulation, we should just first understand that we're not bereft of regulation in this area. I mean, you hear a lot the demands that we have to regulate AI, we have to regulate AI. Look, there's already a lot of laws that apply to AI. So if you talk about harms like fraud or discrimination or privacy violations, defective products, copyright infringement, non-consensual imagery, and many other types of harms, they're already illegal under existing statutes in the United States, and I'm sure there are similar types of laws in other countries. So we already think there's a lot of laws that apply to AI and if we're going to build on them, we should try to build on the laws and regulatory agencies that we already have. So for example, greater transparency, disclosures, audits, things like that might be a good idea. We also have antitrust law to prevent anti-competitive behavior by monopolies or duopolies. I think it's a little early in the development of this market to say that that is the current situation, but we do know that technology markets sometimes have a tendency to monopolize or become duopolies. And if that does happen, we have tools again to prevent competitive behavior. So there's already I think a thicket of laws that apply to AI. The one approach that I think we would really oppose, that we think would be a disaster for us in the US, is the so-called FDA for AI, where you model a new approval process for AI models after what the FDA has for drugs or what the FAA in the US has for airplanes. The issue there is that new drugs or airplanes take years to get approved. I mean some like five years plus. Whereas if you're talking about the AI industry, the AI companies are rolling out new models every 2 months. It's just too dynamic and fast-moving for that type of approach. And I don't think we want to hamstring our innovation that way. I think, you know, I've kind of called it, I don't know if the ministers there will know what our DMV is, but it's our Department of Motor Vehicles, and it's kind of notorious in the US for taking a long time. And when you go to get your driver's license or something like that, I think that any new regulatory agency that has to approve AI product releases will become like a DMV for AI where, you know, new models get stuck in a long queue waiting for approval. Just one final point on this is, you know, a lot of people wonder what is the secret sauce behind Silicon Valley? What has made this such a crown jewel of the American economy? And if I had to boil it down to one principle, it would be permissionless innovation. That is really the principle that's made Silicon Valley so successful is that you can have that founder who's a college dropout who just creates their product in a dorm room or you take the two founders, you know, they could be PhD students who build their product in a garage, you know, and two trillion dollar companies were founded this way, you had Meta and then you had Google. And if those founders had to go to Washington to get approval for their products, I just don't know that those founders would have been able to navigate that sort of bureaucratic maze to get their products approved. So this idea of just allowing innovation to happen and then we regulate it later once it becomes more successful, I think that really has been fundamental to Silicon Valley success and I'd hate to see us lose that through some sort of pre-approval approach.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the one last question for you is, you know, we heard from Elon just before you and asked him about the data center and power needs that are coming our way both in the US and globally to power the AI revolution. And I know you have thought a lot about this data center issue in the United States. President Trump put out a statement yesterday on data centers as well. I'd love your thoughts and to this group on advice as they think about this buildout and the best way to be able to provide the infrastructure that we need for AI, but also do so in a way where we can bring communities along. So, how do you think about this data center issue both in the US and globally?

Well, this is certainly a hot topic today. I know it's become controversial. Let me just make a couple of points about this. So, you know, echoing what President Trump said, here are some facts about it. That data centers, if done right, they bring electricity costs down, not up, because the AI companies will generate net new power generation. That's really the key is obviously if you make the AI companies compete for power or electricity with local residents and just plug into the grid, that could cause electricity prices to go up. But if you allow them to generate their own power, then they will not only generate what they need and they can do that so-called behind the meter, but they can actually contribute the excess back to the grid and that brings electricity cost down. It also provides the sponsorship to make long needed grid upgrades. So it provides the investment to do that. So I think that again, if done right, what we're seeing is that local communities benefit from these data centers. We're seeing hundreds of thousands of new construction and skilled trade jobs as a result of them. And we're seeing that counties that embrace data centers are seeing reduced property taxes. For example, residents of Loudoun County in Virginia in the US are paying $6,000 less on average in property taxes because they have the AI companies picking up that tab. Now just one last point on this is that even though I think the administration has pointed out and President Trump has pointed out the ways in which data centers can be a very good deal for local communities, we haven't done anything to try and force local communities to accept data centers they don't want. I think I'm seeing some fake news around this. Michael, as you know, because we worked on our national AI policy framework and then the president signed an executive order in December of last year, the president expressly said in his executive order that we would not, the federal government should not preempt the decision of states with respect to data centers. It is fundamentally a local decision and we respect that and have done nothing to change that, even though we do think that ultimately there is a good deal to be had there for local communities if they lean into it.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time and it means a lot that you could join us today. Really appreciate it, David.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Thanks. And for our last speaker, it is my privilege to introduce Bob Mumgard. As the co-founder and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the world's largest fusion energy company, Dr. Mumgard is the perfect person to talk to about the full life cycle of emerging technologies and moving innovation from experiments in a laboratory to commercialization and world transformation. So, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Mumgard.

Glad to be here. Thank you very much, Dr. Gracias.

Wonderful. Well, in the Carolina principles that the G20 nations have agreed to, we outline how governments can accelerate the development of emerging technologies. And I think what's so unique about your technology is it's something that years ago there wasn't a lot of private sector investment in it. And how do you see the policy decisions in the US or the policy environment here have allowed you to raise capital to build and to ultimately develop fusion tech?

Right, so fusion tech, it doesn't suffer from a market pull issue in the future. We know that intelligence and energy are the drivers of the economy, so there's plenty of people that want advanced energy technologies. Those markets are well established, but the barrier to creating products in those markets is how do you take deep science? How do you couple that with capital? How do you put that into organizations that can both stay true to that science, build on it, scale and get to the point where they can demonstrate meaningful results and eventually a product? And these products are billion-dollar level products. These are not consumer grade or software products. As Elon said, moving atoms is very different than moving bits. And moving atoms at 100 million degrees is different than just moving atoms. And so that requires a really well-tuned innovation environment. You have to have the capital sources. You have to have the scientific expertise. Then you also have to have the grease, the glue that the government can provide to string that together. So in the fusion industry today, there's over 50 companies and over 14 billion of private investment. If you go back 10 years ago, that did not exist at all. And of those, for that 14 billion, the vast majority of that and of the companies is in the United States. And CFS, we're the largest of those, about $4 billion. And we're building a facility outside of Boston that in the previous generation would have been like a Manhattan Project government size facility. The reason that's been able to happen is because the government has been a partner in this, not a restraint. And so a couple examples. One on the regulatory side, how do you license a fusion power plant? That was, you know, four years ago a completely untested question. And it would have been easy to say, well, let's figure all that out exactly and build a whole new structure all up front that was very prescriptive. That would have been wrong because we don't know what this technology is. We don't know the issues at the detailed level, but we do know enough to protect the public. So instead we said was in the United States, in the UK, let's look at the hazards, let's take the closest relevant example that already exists, in our case particle accelerators, and make sure that fusion fits in there and provide the certainty that regulation is not going to stop this at the infant, at the early stage, we're going to have enough room to be able to get the first products out and that gave the certainty to investors to put billions of dollars into this by removing an obstacle that everyone has seen in advanced new technologies before. Another piece of this was taking the existing publicly funded research that has built up expertise and finding ways to partner with that between the private and public sector. It would have been easy to say, well, the government should go and build the first generation of power plants, but that's a path to nowhere. Those power plants never make it to the market. We sort of throw it over the fence and there's no one to catch it. Instead, we can say, let's take the expertise that's been developed and let's do public private partnerships, provide access to that expertise in ways that preserve intellectual property so that companies can form and build on top of that. Let's make it so that the capital, some help for the earliest ideas can flow into the bigger ideas that can attract additional private capital on top of public capital. And that bootstraps up almost all the US fusion companies.

Yeah. I think that's a really great point. I think one that we stress a lot that is these new technologies start to be commercialized, the knee-jerk reaction of regulators should not be to create entirely new constructs for regulating them but to think very carefully of what regulations are already on the books that can apply to that particular technology first. And I think David made that point. I think Elon to some degree made it. I guess maybe the last question for you and I think something that we're all curious about is timelines. I think with Fusion that's always been the question historically. We've had two important conversations with David and Elon about how important power is going to be for the AI revolution that is here and is only going to be accelerating in the years ahead. Obviously having fusion as part of the energy mix would be one of the greatest unlocks in human history. So all of us are eagerly awaiting the commercialization. So how do you think about it? And when do you see the real impact happening on our grid?

Well, you know, the first is to avoid the fallacy that the past is prologue. So we're dealing with a situation today in fusion but other advanced sort of physical technologies where the tool set available to the innovator is just so much broader and deeper than it was even 5 years ago. And so when we look at what we can do with large scale compute, with AI, with advanced materials, but also what we can do with how we organize ourselves, who all do you pull into the tent? What's their previous experience? How have they been trained? That's a whole new generation of people. And you put those two together, we're seeing that you can drastically accelerate things that we used to think took a long time. We saw that of course first in software. We're seeing it now in large scale compute and AI. Things that even six years ago we thought were a long way off and so we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that things have to go slow. Now when you look at the timelines that are happening, it's basically how fast can you build things. So we are building, just finishing up this facility in Massachusetts but we're getting ready to start the first commercial power plant construction in Virginia, just up the road from you. And so that could put fusion on the grid in the early 2030s. There's a lot of technology that has to be worked out as we go, but the tool set is well adapted to that technology. If we plan for a longer horizon, so say fusion is not going to be here to the '50s, like we're not going to go faster, we're going to make it happen in the '50s. So, we should plan for the most aggressive speed we can do and bring all the tools to bear on that. And I think the US has done a good model of that and it's an example around the world where we're seeing countries shorten up their timelines for fusion, you know, systematically year-over-year as they see the progress primarily happen in the United States.

No, I think it's been incredible to see and the amount of private sector investment in the industry has been unbelievable. And I think for any of you who have extra time in the United States, I highly recommend you come, you go visit Bob outside of Boston. It's truly incredible what is being built by our private sector. So thank you so much for your time. It means a lot that you could join us here today.

Thank you.

So, I think we're going to let the press flow out and then we can have our close press discussion as a group.

Priorities and we're all very much driven to achieve the best things for our people. And I think for us to be able to find consensus on a set of principles that can ensure we remain leaders in emerging technology is very heartening and it's something that I think all of us should be very proud of. I think your teams did an incredible job in working with our negotiating team to make this happen and those of you who've done this know it's not necessarily that easy to get to that point. So, it means a lot that we were able to do this and I do believe it will be kind of a lasting and important document for all of the G20 economies. I can't stress enough how important we believe that technological progress and innovation are for economic growth. And as we think about the biggest drivers of economic growth across all of our economies over the last few years, it's quite obvious that technology is the biggest potential unlock. And if we can get the systems in place to allow that technology to be developed and ultimately to flourish, I think we'll all benefit. So again, I think it's something we should all be proud of and I just wanted to thank everyone for your good work on that.

Amazing.

So, our first speaker is Elon Musk. As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon has shown that conquering challenges of physics and engineering can be easier than cutting through red tape. And I think his dedication to doing both, however, continues to inspire people around the world. So, thank you, Elon, for joining us. We were just wrapping up our introductory session where we made clear that under this presidency, we believe that economic growth is one of the most important drivers for all of us, and we believe that technology is a big piece of that. So you've been on the front lines of this for quite a while, and I think one of the key questions for the group and something that we wanted to talk to you about was, as you have driven innovation across multiple countries around the world, what in your opinion separates countries where innovators can successfully turn breakthroughs into deployed technologies from those where progress actually stalls? Because I think there's a lot of lessons learned about what governments should be doing and what maybe they shouldn't be.

One question that a lot of the countries here face is a question around adoption. I think there's a general recognition that adopting emerging technologies can be very beneficial to economic growth, no matter what sort of shape or size of any country is. How do you think about adoption? What should countries be doing to encourage adoption? Does it go back to the same sort of regulatory structures, or how do you think about adoption as a key driver for growth?

These are mind-boggling numbers.

Yeah, I was just about to say that. One of the stats we gave to the group here was that in the four years since ChatGPT was launched, I think there's over a billion people around the world already using AI. I guess the question to you is, I think a lot of people think about the next chapter being in this sort of applied or physical AI. Where do you see robotics trending? How quickly is it going to be implemented? I think I remember in the first Trump administration we were talking about automated factories, and now we're a year later, 10 years later. So how quickly do you think these changes are happening in the physical AI world?

Wow.

Wow. So shifting gears just a little bit to a question that's kind of facing the US today. Data centers have been a big political issue over the last 6 to 8 months here in the United States. And I think there's a general understanding that in order to drive and power the AI revolution that's coming, we need to have the electricity and the data center compute capacity to do the training and the inference of all this AI. How do you think about this particular issue? Where are we on the curve of how much we've built versus how much we need? And as government leaders here think about how to prepare their economies and build the right power and data infrastructure, how should they be thinking about where compute and power needs are going to be in the next few years?

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time. It meant a lot that you could join us here and really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Great. Now we'll be hearing from David Sacks as a former White House AI SAR and my co-chair on the President's Council of Advisers for Science and Technology. He's a successful investor and I think David understands intimately the importance of regulatory clarity and certainty for the development of new industries built on emerging technologies. So I think he's going to join us in a second.

There we go.

Hey Michael.

Amazing. Great to see you David. How are you?

Good. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well we're excited to have you here. I think you and I have worked together for a while now on ensuring that the US can continue to be a home of great innovation, technological discovery. I think the kind of opening question for you, and just to set the stage a little, the core theme that the president is driving for G20 is a return to growth and how all of us as G20 economies can think about growth as a north star, and particularly for this meeting, how technology can be a driver of that growth. So I guess the opening question for you is, when you think about the policy conditions that need to be in place to allow innovators to innovate, to invest, to experiment, to bring new technologies to market, how should all of these ministers here be thinking about that? What are the types of regulatory conditions we should have in place in our countries?

Well, I think first of all, we do have an AI boom going on in the United States. I mean the AI boom is already here and I think this is a very positive thing. It's something that we should be trying to nurture as opposed to hamstring. Just a couple of quick numbers on this is that roughly $800 billion is being invested in the US this year on capex related to building out the infrastructure for AI, the compute capacity, and that number is expected to be $1.4 trillion next year. And every time I see the numbers, they keep getting revised up. We really haven't seen a buildout of this kind of infrastructure.

this kind of infrastructure. You have to go all the way back to the railroads in the 1800s to see something of equal scale. It's actually even bigger than the fiber buildout of the internet. It's a new industrial revolution. And I think that if we harness this correctly, it's an opportunity for the US to re-industrialize, to upgrade its power grid, to bring back some manufacturing in these cutting edge areas, which has been a priority of President Trump. But obviously, I think it's also something that all the other countries of the world can benefit as well if they lean into it.

Yeah. I think one of the things that is covered in our Carolina principles is thinking about the policy environment that we can set up to support innovation. And I think we have quite a diverse set of members in the G20 who think about sort of how to approach regulation in kind of unique ways that can ultimately support their people. When you think about kind of how as tech ministers we should be thinking about sort of the regulatory construct. Are there general sort of lessons in the types of things we should be thinking that the government should be working more on or less or what is your general advice on or thoughts on broad tech regulation?

Well, I think when we talk about AI regulation, we should just first understand that we're not bereft of regulation in this area. I mean, you hear a lot the demands that we have to regulate AI. We have to regulate AI. Look, there's already a lot of laws that apply to AI. So if you talk about harms like fraud or discrimination or privacy violations, defective products, copyright infringement, non-consensual imagery, and many other types of harms. They're already illegal under existing statutes in the United States, and I'm sure there are similar types of laws in other countries. So we already think there's a lot of laws that apply to AI and if we're going to build on them, we should try to build on the laws and regulatory agencies that we already have. So for example, greater transparency, disclosures, audits, things like that might be a good idea. We also have antitrust law to prevent anti-competitive behavior by monopolies or duopolies. So I think it's a little early in the development of this market to say that that is the current situation, but we do know that technology markets sometimes have a tendency to monopolize or become duopolies. And if that does happen, we have tools again to prevent competitive behavior. So there's already I think a thicket of laws that apply to AI. The one approach that I think we would really oppose that we think would be a disaster for us in the US is this so-called FDA for AI where you model a new approval process for AI models after what the FDA has for drugs or what the FAA in the US has for airplanes. The issue there is that new drugs or airplanes take years to get approved. I mean some like 5 years plus. Whereas if you're talking about the AI industry, the AI companies are rolling out new models every 2 months. It's just too dynamic and fast-moving for that type of approach. And I don't think we want to hamstring our innovation that way. I think, you know, I've kind of called it I don't know if the ministers there will know what our DMV is, but it's our Department of Motor Vehicles and it's kind of notorious in the US for taking a long time. And you know when you go to get your driver's license or something like that and I think that any new regulatory agency that has to approve AI product releases will become like a DMV for AI where you know new models get stuck in a long queue waiting for approval. Just one final point on this is you know a lot of people wonder what is the secret sauce behind Silicon Valley? What has made this such a crown jewel of the American economy? And if I had to boil it down to one principle, it would be permissionless innovation. That is really the principle that's made Silicon Valley so successful is that you can have that founder who's a college dropout who just creates their product in a dorm room or you take the two founders, you know, they could be PhD students who build their product in a garage. You know, and you know, two trillion dollar companies were founded this way. You had Meta and then you had Google. And if those founders had to go to Washington to get approval for their products, I just don't know that those founders would have been able to navigate that sort of bureaucratic maze to get their products approved. So this idea of just allowing innovation to happen and then we regulate it later once it becomes more successful, I think that really has been fundamental to Silicon Valley success and I'd hate to see us lose that through some sort of pre-approval approach.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the one last question for you is you know we heard from Elon just before you and asked him about sort of the data center and power needs that are coming our way both in the US and globally to power the AI revolution. And I know you have sort of thought a lot about this data center issue in the United States. President Trump put out a statement yesterday on data centers as well. You know, I'd love your thoughts and to this group on advice as they think about this buildout and the best way to be able to, you know, provide the infrastructure that we need for AI, but also do so in a way where we can bring communities along. So, how do you think about this data center issue both in the US and globally?

Well, this is certainly a hot topic today. I know it's become controversial. Let me just make a couple of points about this. So, you know, echoing what President Trump said, so here are some facts about it that data centers, if done right, they bring electricity costs down, not up, because the AI companies will generate net new power generation. That's really the key is obviously if you make the AI companies compete for power or electricity with local residents and just plug into the grid, that could cause electricity prices to go up. But if you allow them to generate their own power, then they will not only generate what they need and they can do that so-called behind the meter, but they can actually contribute the excess back to the grid and that brings electricity cost down. It also provides the sponsorship to make long needed grid upgrades. So it provides the investment to do that. So I, you know, I think that again, if done right, what we're seeing is that local communities benefit from these data centers. We're seeing hundreds of thousands of new construction and skilled trade jobs as a result of them. And we're seeing that counties that embrace data centers are seeing reduced property taxes. For example, residents of Loudoun County in Virginia in the US are paying $6,000 less on average in property taxes because they have the AI companies picking up that tab. Now just one last point on this is that even though I think the administration has pointed out and President Trump has pointed out the ways in which data centers can be a very good deal for local communities, we haven't done anything to try and force local communities to accept data centers they don't want. I think I'm seeing some fake news around this. Michael, as you know, because we worked on our national AI policy framework and then the president signed an executive order in December of last year, the president expressly said in his executive order that we would not the federal government should not preempt the decision of states with respect to data centers. It is fundamentally a local decision and we respect that and have done nothing to change that. Even though we do think that ultimately that there is a good deal to be had there for local communities if they lean into it.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time and it means a lot that you could join us today. Really appreciate it, David.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Thanks. And for our last speaker, it is my privilege to introduce Bob Mumgard. As the co-founder and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the world's largest fusion energy company, Dr. Mumgard is the perfect person to talk to about the full life cycle of emerging technologies and moving innovation from experiments in a laboratory to commercialization and world transformation. So, thank you so much for joining us Dr. Mumgard.

Glad to be here. Thank you very much Dr. Graasios.

Wonderful. Well, in the Carolina principles that the G20 nations have agreed to, we outline how governments can accelerate the development of emerging technologies. And I think what's so unique about your technology is it's something that years ago there wasn't a lot of private sector investment in it. And you know how do you see the policy decisions in the US or the policy environment here have allowed you to raise capital to build and to ultimately develop fusion tech?

Right, so you know fusion tech it doesn't suffer from a market pull issue in the future. We know that intelligence and energy are the drivers of the economy so there's plenty of people that want advanced energy technologies. Those markets are well established but the barrier to creating products in those markets is how do you take deep science? How do you couple that with capital? How do you put that into organizations that can both you know stay true to that science, build on it, scale and get to the point where they can demonstrate meaningful results and eventually a product and these products are billion-dollar level products. These are not consumer grade or software products. As Elon said, moving atoms is very very different than moving bits. And moving atoms at 100 million degrees is different than just moving atoms. And so that requires a really really well-tuned innovation environment. You have to have the capital sources. You have to have the scientific expertise, but then you also have to have the grease, the glue that the government can provide to string that together. So in the fusion industry today, there's over 50 companies and over 14 billion of private investment. If you go back 10 years ago, that did not exist at all. And of those for that 14 billion the vast majority of that and of the companies is in the United States and CFS we're the largest of those about $4 billion and we're building a facility outside of Boston that in the previous generation would have been like a Manhattan project government size facility. The reason that's been able to happen is because the government has been a partner in this not a restraint. And so a couple examples, one on the regulatory side, what is how do you license a fusion power plant? That was, you know, four years ago a completely untested question. And it would have been easy to say, well, let's figure all that out exactly and build a whole new structure all up front that was very prescriptive. That would have been wrong because we don't know what this technology is. We don't know the issues at the detailed level, but we do know enough to protect the public. So instead we said was in the United States in the UK let's look at the hazards let's take the closest relevant example that already exists in our case particle accelerators and make sure that fusion fits in there and provide the certainty that regulation is not going to stop this at the infant at the early stage we're going to have enough room to be able to get the first products out and that gave the certainty to investors to put billions of dollars into this by removing a obstacle that everyone has seen and advanced new technologies before. Another piece of this was taking the existing publicly funded research that has built up expertise and finding ways to partner with that between the private and public sector. It would have been easy to say well the government should go and build the first generation of power plants. But that's a path to nowhere. Those power plants never make it to the market. We sort of throw it over the fence and there's no one to catch it. Instead, we can say, let's take the expertise that's been developed and let's do public private partnerships, provide access to that expertise in ways that preserve intellectual property so that companies can form and build on top of that. Let's make it so that the capital, some help for the earliest ideas can flow into the bigger ideas that can attract them additional private capital on top of public capital. And that bootstraps up almost all the US fusion companies.

Yeah. I think that's a really great point. I think one that you know we stress a lot that is these new technologies start to be commercialized the knee-jerk reaction of regulators should not be to create entirely new constructs for regulating them but to think very carefully of sort of what regulations are already on the books that can apply to that particular technology first. And I think David made that point. I think Elon to some degree made it. I guess maybe the last question for you and I think something that I think we're all curious about is timelines. I think with Fusion that's always been the question historically. We've had two important conversations with David and Elon about how important power is going to be for the AI revolution that is here and is only going to be accelerating in the years ahead. Obviously having fusion as part of the energy mix would be one of the greatest unlocks in human history. So all of us are eagerly awaiting the commercialization. So how do you think about it? And when do you see sort of the real impact happening on our grid?

Well, you know, the first is to avoid the fallacy that passes prologue. So we're dealing with a situation today in fusion but other advances of physical technologies where the tool set that's available to the innovator is just so much broader and deeper than it was even 5 years ago and so we look at what we can do with large scale compute with AI with advanced materials but also what we can do with like how we organize ourselves what you know what do you who all do you pull into the tent what's their previous experience how have they been trained that's a whole new generation of people and you put those two together, we're seeing that you can drastically accelerate things that we used to think took a long time. We saw that of course first in software. We're seeing it now in large scale compute and AI things that even 6 years ago we thought were a long way off. And so we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that things have to go slow. Now when you look at the timelines that are happening, it's basically how fast can you build things. So, we are building just finishing up this facility in Massachusetts, but we're getting ready to start the first commercial power plant construction in Virginia, just up the road from you. And so that could put Fusion on the grid in the early 2030s. There's a lot of technology that has to be worked out as we go, but the tool set is well adapted to that technology. If we plan for a longer horizon, so say fusion is not going to be here to the 50s, like we're not going to go faster, we're going to make it happen in the 50s. So we should plan for the most aggressive speed we can do and bring all the tools to bear on that. And I think the US has done a good model of that and it's an example around the world where we're seeing countries shorten up their timelines for fusion, you know, systematically year-over-year as they see the progress primarily happen in the United States.

No, I think it's been incredible to see and the amount of private sector investment in the industry has been unbelievable. And I think for any of you who have extra time in the United States, I highly recommend you come you go visit Bob outside of Boston. It's truly truly incredible what is being built by our private sector. So thank you so much for your time. It means a lot that you could join us here today.

Thank you.

priorities and we're all very much driven to achieve the best things for our people and I think for us to be able to find consensus on a set of principles that can ensure we remain leaders in emerging technology I think is very heartening and it's something that I think all of us should be very proud of. I think your teams did an incredible job in working with our negotiating team to make this happen and those of you who've done this know it's not necessarily that easy to get to that point. So, it means a lot that we were able to do this and I do believe it will be kind of a lasting and important document for all of the G20 economies. I can't stress enough how important we believe that technological progress and innovation are for economic growth. And as we think about the biggest drivers of economic growth across all of our economies over the last few years, it's quite obvious that technology is the biggest potential unlock. And if we can get the systems in place to allow that technology to be developed and ultimately to flourish, I think we'll all benefit. So again, I think it's something we should all be proud of and I just wanted to thank everyone for your good work on that.

So, so first our first speaker is Elon Musk. As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon has shown that conquering challenges of physics engineering can be easier than cutting through red tape. And I think his dedication to doing both however continues to inspire people around the world. So, thank you Elon for joining us. We were just wrapping up our introductory session where we made clear that under this presidency you know we believe that economic growth is one of the most important drivers for all of us and we believe that technology is a big piece of that. So you've been on the front lines of this for quite a while and I think one of the key questions I think for the group and something that we wanted to talk to you about was as you have driven innovation across multiple countries around the world. You know what in your opinion separates countries where innovators can successfully turn breakthroughs into deployed technologies from those where progress actually stalls because I think there's a lot of lessons learned about what people governments should be doing and what maybe they shouldn't be.

One question that a lot of the countries here face is a question around adoption. I think there's a general recognition that adopting emerging technologies can be very beneficial to economic growth no matter what sort of shape size of any country is. You know how do you think about adoption? What country what should countries be doing to encourage adoption? Does it go back to the same sort of regulatory structures or how do you think about adoption as a key driver for growth?

These are mind-boggling numbers.

One of the stats we gave to the group here was that in the four years since sort of ChatGPT was launched, I think there's you know over a billion people around the world already using AI. I guess the question to you is I think a lot of people think about sort of the next chapter being in this sort of applied or sort of physical AI where do you see sort of robotics trending? How quickly is it going to be implemented? I think I remember in the first Trump administration we were talking about sort of automated factories and now we're a year later 10 years later. So how quickly do you think these changes are happening in the sort of physical AI world?