Emerald AI’s Varun Sivaram & Axios’ Amy Harder

Thank you, Amy.

Davos is bigger than ever and it was pretty big before. I will say my favorite Davos was the one they held almost in the summertime in May. It was not cold. But this Davos, I think I see more high-profile folks just walking the halls of the Congress Center than I ever seen like and Matt Damon who I embarrassed you and we took a selfie backstage secretly.

I'm glad you forgive me, Amy. But it's been a fantastic Davos. The way I think about Davos, by the way, is try and practice the Swiss serendipity with discipline, which means you kind of hope for the surprise meetings, but you put yourself strategically in the locations for that to happen. For me, I perched right at the entrance of the W partners Lounge today for an hour and I met probably 10 CEOs that I wanted to partner with at Emerald. So, that's Davos in a nutshell.

I can neither confirm nor deny.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm seeing some of our investors here. I didn't even know I'd see you Hill from Atlanta. Look, I think 2026 is when energy and AI become the most important topic because they govern the way that the most important technology of humanity's future will evolve. In the United States, where I'm coming from, energy has become the key bottleneck for AI's growth. In America, we want to build 50 gigawatts of AI just in the next three years. We'll only be able to plug in 25 of it. That's true in Europe, UK, and India. It's true everywhere except China where by 2030, 400 gigawatts is the spare capacity they're going to have for AI. Chips are their bottleneck. We have the chips, but we don't have the energy. In order to surmount this, however, there's this dilemma because if you rapidly build out the grid and build out natural gas power plants as fast as humanly possible, you end up raising rates for communities near where the data centers get cited. So you've either got innovation and competitiveness, lots of data centers, and you've got high prices, or you have no innovation and you have affordability. We founded Emerald AI to break that dilemma because I think you should be able to have both breakneck innovation in AI, lots of AI data centers, but at the same time, affordable rates for communities where data centers aren't a villain. They don't come into your community and raise your prices. They come into your community, create economic benefits, and lower your prices.

Look, President Trump is absolutely right to draw a line in the sand on affordability. But we can't have data centers raising costs for all ordinary citizens. In Columbus, Ohio, the cost of annual power bill for a household went up by $240 in 2025, directly attributable to data centers. Now, data centers aren't the only reason the price is rising, but they're one of the most salient easy to finger ones. However, I think that there are ways for us to get around this difficult dilemma, and President Trump is right to say we need some decisive action. What the president proposed was that hey let's make sure that hyperscalers and big tech pay their fair share for all the new generations that's going to have to come online and that's a fair thing to do. What we do at Emerald AI is we try and make AI data centers a friendly flexible grid asset. We make them power flexible so that you're actually able to connect them to power grids without triggering brand new infrastructure. This issue is not going away. Affordability is not going away. It'll be the biggest issue in the United States in the midterm elections. But it's not just the US. You know we're here at Davos. It's a global convening. The United Kingdom faces these issues. Europe faces these issues. Every country in the world faces these issues. If we can get a technology to enable us to connect grid friendly data centers, there's a chance that we aren't going to have to either put all of the costs on hyperscalers and big tech and emerging neoclouds raising the cost of AI or simply not build out the energy infrastructure and fail to connect the AI.

Look, I'm not going to tell a Republican president anything. I agree that President Trump wants AI dominance and he wants energy dominance. We can accomplish both of them. Here's how I do it. I call it an all of the above strategy. That's something that Republicans have always been able to get behind. We need lots of new generation, whether it's nuclear, for example. We're also going to need to prudently expand our power grid. We've needed to do that for a century, right? America, unfortunately, has had flat power demand for the last two decades. And this is kind of the first time we're seeing load growth or electricity demand growth. It's driven by AI data centers, but also a bunch of other economic activity. What does all of the above means? We need more generation, expanding our grid, but we also need intelligent demand. If we put all those three together, then we'll actually have an affordable system and all the AI data centers we want. That last piece is critical, intelligent demand. I believe that the president and his department of energy has been clear that this is on the table. I believe that the president and the administration should support a pathway for AI data centers to get connected to power grids faster if they're willing to be flexible. If they're willing to flex their power output when the grid is tight. If they do that, think of the grid as a superhighway that only faces peak rush hour a couple times a month. If they do that, you'll be able to take advantage of all the excess stranded capacity on the power grid today that's there and available 99% of the time.

We absolutely have. I went to the White House multiple times to present this. I think Energy Secretary Chris Wright actually wrote a letter launching a process with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission including this as one of the several principles for how we might be able to more quickly connect new.