All-In Summit: EQT CEO Toby Rice on How Data Centers May Lower Electricity Costs

Happy to be here, Kristen.

We've got a couple things that brought us here. One, I've been listening to the All-In podcast for a long time. Big fan of the guys. I was doing a speaking engagement with Chris Wright, and Chamath was there, and he invited me to come out here, which is great. So, happy to accept his invitation. And also, the tech community is actually one of the biggest customers for oil and gas. We're talking about the AI buildout, the tremendous power generation and natural gas needs. As America's natural gas champion, our role is to make sure our tech companies have all the energy needs so they can run full throttle. Win this AI race for America. So, we're happy to be here networking and getting to know the players.

So, as America's natural gas champion, we produce over a million barrels a day worth of energy, all in natural gas form. As you know, natural gas is used to make steel, cement, plastic, fertilizer, the modern building blocks of modern civilization. It's also used to make power. 40% of the electricity in this country comes from generating natural gas. Natural gas is actually going to overtake oil in the next few years as the largest primary source of energy in this country. So, every day at EQT, we wake up thinking about three things. How can we make natural gas cheaper? How can we make it more reliable? And how we can make it cleaner? Because those are the attributes of energy for the future. And when you're talking about building big things that require a lot of energy, they're going to pick, like data centers, they're going to pick the energy that's the cheapest, most reliable, cleanest. And after doing the full landscape assessment of all the choices, this industry has chosen natural gas. And as America's natural gas champion, we're incredibly excited to power the future and win this AI race.

Well, I don't think it's going to come down to chips or the models that people create or the apps that we develop. I think the consistent theme you hear here is can we actually get the power generation to power these massive data centers. So, when you're talking about power generation, you're also talking about the natural gas it takes to power those big machines. I do believe it's one of the biggest bottlenecks in the value chain and that's why, to our dismay, we're seeing a lot of the conversations take place in this country about pushing back on artificial intelligence, slowing down data center development. And unfortunately, we've seen a lot of the playbook that took place in oil and gas trying to shut down our industry is now being used to help prevent bottlenecks in place to prevent amazing, groundbreaking technology like artificial intelligence from reaching the world stage. So, this is not just about the best energy solution. We also have to make sure we're great in the community understands how awesome this is and I'd say I'd summarize my concern by this. I think, you know, all these concerns that people have should be taken into consideration. We should take them very seriously, but the good news is that everybody's talking about AI, everybody's talking about energy and specifically natural gas. The bad news is too much of the conversation is centered on fear and people should be focused not only on what they stand to lose, but we should be talking about what we stand to create. And this is one of the biggest opportunities that we have is unleashing artificial intelligence, bringing more energy into this world because you know, energy creates wealth. The artificial intelligence will make sure that that energy translates to wealth. It's how we can improve the lives not just for the developed countries, but for the billions around the world that desperately need and are wanting a quality of life that we've been able to create here in the United States.