It's not hard to find immigrant success stories in Silicon Valley. Varun Sivaram grew up with one.
My dad's been my role model my whole life. You know, he came from India, immigrated with very little to his name. He became a PhD scientist in his own right, material science. His first job was across the corner for Gordon Moore, one of the titans of Silicon Valley.
Sivaram went on to become a VP at SanDisk and eventually president of the company that acquired it, Western Digital, a Fortune 500 company that's responsible for most of the memory in your cell phones and in computers and data centers around the world.
Growing up, Varun wanted to emulate his dad's success, but he was torn.
I've always had these twin loves. One is for science and technology, and one is for international relations and foreign policy.
At Stanford, Varun double majored in engineering and international relations. Four years later, he leaned into science and technology. He went to Oxford to study condensed matter physics. And one day in the lab, something amazing happened.
I was next to my fellow graduate student, Mike Lee, who by accident discovered a miracle material.
It was late at night and Varun and Mike were studying how to use a mineral called perovskite in solar cells. After mixing two ingredients in the wrong proportion, Mike happened to stumble upon a winning recipe for solar efficiency.
When he showed the graphs, our jaws just dropped. I mean, this was an unbelievable efficiency from a material we had no hopes of. I was the luckiest graduate student in the world getting to witness history in the making in the solar field.
But it just wasn't the right time and place to commercialize the discovery. This was back in 2012, a year after the Solyndra bankruptcy, which as you know was a bad time for solar startups.
It was a very tough period. I observed that and realized that next generation solar technologies would face real hurdles on their route to commercialization.
So after earning his PhD, Varun decided to focus on his other love, international relations. And over the course of three years, his career really took off.
I joined the Council on Foreign Relations, and I led their energy and climate program. I taught at Georgetown. I taught at Columbia and I wrote a book on the future of solar energy.
Later he would spend two years working in India as chief technology officer for the clean energy provider Renew Power.
It was an unbeatable opportunity. India was showing the world how an emerging economy could transition toward clean energy at very low cost.
But policy work would call him back in 2021. He joined the Biden administration serving as an energy and innovation adviser to John Kerry. And then he headed back to tech again. In 2024, after a short time at the wind energy company Orsted, Varun founded Emerald AI. It was a switch not from tech to policy but from energy supply to energy demand.
Instead of building supply projects, I'm focused on demand. I think that an energy transformation will require the biggest new source of demand, AI, to also become the grid's greatest ally.
Last year, Emerald AI came out of stealth mode with a demonstration project designed to show the value of using AI for better grid management.
AI is emerging as the biggest new user of energy. And if we can't find a way to make AI an intelligent user of that energy, then unfortunately, we're not going to meet any of our goals. But if we can harness AI as the most intelligent user of energy, I actually think that AI could save the grid, far from undermining it.
This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer-centric.
Today my guest is Varun Sivaram, CEO of Emerald AI. We talk about Emerald AI's demonstration project at a data center in Arizona. We also discuss a collaboration the company is now doing with Nvidia and Digital Realty, a data center developer. And we learn about the results of a matchup that pitted Emerald AI's technology against surging power demand in London. It's a story about a data center, but also about soccer and tea kettles. But first, I asked Varun to explain just what problem Emerald AI software is working to solve and how exactly it does that.
