So, what is Exowatt? Exowatt is developing the solar backbone for the AI infrastructure. So, think of this as like a solar panel, but that has a built-in battery.
One of the elements of our product is actually a Fresnel lens. This essentially focuses the light coming in from the sun onto the battery material. It gets very hot and then stores that energy. So, what Exowatt is really doing, our mission is to build a solar backbone. That's really important because you think about the AI race is so intense that it's now time to power, right? I need power. I don't care how you make it. If you talk about a gigawatt data center, that's almost a million US households of energy. And the grid is just really not built for that. The most important thing is, at the end of the day, the raw materials that we use, sand and dirt and steel, right? And so, you don't have to go import something from China. Really, the vision and idea is to scale this to the millions and billions of units, then build it better, faster, cheaper, and don't take no for an answer.
Welcome to Exowatt Miami. Thank you. Thanks for having us here. So, what is Exowatt? So, Exowatt is developing the solar backbone for the AI infrastructure. So, we're powering data centers that require enormous amounts of power with solar energy that's available around the clock, which is not something that people usually think of when they think sun, because the sun goes down at the end of the day, but we've developed a technology that we'll show you today that allows us to capture that energy and make it available and dispatchable around the clock to power base load applications like data centers.
Amazing. So, we're going to do a little tour around the office. I did see the little model in there. So, we got to go check that out and it looks like you have merch, too.
Yes, we do.
You want to start there? I definitely do. Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, please come in. Um, so our flagship product is called the Exowatt P3. And so, this is a desktop model, as you said. And essentially, as you can see, it's a modular system. Um, each module the size of a standard shipping container. And it's made of three elements. That's why it's called the P3. So, the three elements are the optical table, so these lenses, and then you have the heat battery and the PCU or the power conversion unit all in this kind of container. And the idea is that we capture energy from the sun throughout the day. These lenses are tracking the sun. And then they're focusing that light onto a series of rocks, right? That's the heat battery. And then that energy is then transferred via an air loop to the engine, which produces electricity. So, think of this as like a solar panel, but that has a built-in battery. And that essentially, you can scale linearly to any project size. So, if a data center customer needs 100 megawatts or a gigawatt or however many gigawatts, you just stack these next to each other. And kind of the hypothesis behind Exowatt is that none of the elements of what we're doing here are new. People have been using lenses, you know, centuries long ago. Uh, the engine technology that we use is very established and old as well. And essentially, what we're using to store the energy is ancient as time. So, it's essentially rocks.
And um, so none of that is new. What's new really about our approach and our hypothesis is making this in a modular fashion, making this in a factory, and then scaling the production to millions and ultimately billions of these, which ultimately allows us to go down the cost curve and generate electricity at our ultimate goal of 1 cent per kilowatt hour. And so, that's why we started the company. That's kind of been the goal North Star from the beginning. And now, we're on a track and a path to get there.
How did you actually found the company and who was involved?
Yeah, it's And why Miami? Yeah, yeah, interesting story. Um, so we started here because I moved here from San Francisco after I sold my last company to work with Jack and Chester at the Atomic team. So, the Atomic is a venture studio. They start a bunch of companies internally. And so, I moved in as a founder in residence back in 2022 and started working with Jack ideating around what could become Exowatt. Really, the hypothesis was um, the modularity. So, we knew solar technologies, especially solar PV and solar thermal are established technologies. Solar PV has actually been really successful in coming down the cost curve. If you look at the trajectory over the last 50 years, the cost of making a solar panel has gone down by 99.6%. Uh, but solar thermal hasn't gone down that trajectory because most of the time people have built very large projects. And so, we said like there's an opportunity to take that modular approach to solar thermal, which actually is contrarian, right? Because a lot of people say, you know, if you think about thermodynamic systems, you always want to build the largest system possible, right? That's why you want to build the largest rocket, you want to build the largest engine, you want to build the largest thermal mass, because the larger the system is, the better the thermodynamic efficiency. So, to go and say like we're going to build a small modular thermodynamic system is kind of contrarian and counterintuitive. But we actually saw the benefits of doing that because we can very much control the cost and make that a process that we can replicate over and over and have a learning curve over similar to solar PV. And so, that's kind of was the hypothesis. And we didn't really have any sense of what is a product or what it's going to look like. So, what you see here and the future iterations, they're nothing we dreamt of. It was basically a process of iterating. So, we went through various prototypes. We went through 50 different configurations to even come up with this one. And we've continued to iterate on that. And every time, the approach we've taken is like, how do we get to 1 cent per kilowatt hour? Which is, by the way, for context like, you know, electricity prices probably where you are at or where we're here at for residential customers are anywhere between 13 to 20 cents a kilowatt hour. Um, for commercial customers, it could be as low as 8 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour. So, to get to 1 cent a kilowatt hour is insanely, insanely low. And if you think about data centers, they're signing contracts as, you know, on the mid-range 20 cents a kilowatt hour up to 30 cents a kilowatt hour. So, they're really desperate to get power and we really want to solve this. And we saw a path to doing it sustainably. So, we saw a path to doing it, by the way, in the US, right? This is before tariffs were an issue and before all the policy was an issue. We said, in order to get to that cost, we need to manufacture domestically. We need to source domestically. We need to make this using raw materials that don't come from China, that are not rare earth minerals. And all of that is what we continue to iterate on. So, every configuration that we designed, we looked at the bill of materials or the BOM, and we asked ourselves, what can we eliminate from this? How can we make this simpler? And the same approach you see at SpaceX, right? Or at Tesla. So, that's where I was before my last company. So, that like that constant iteration on let's remove parts, let's make it simpler, let's scale the manufacturing is what has led to this. And yeah, we'll kind of show you the real product outside. Okay. Yeah. Amazing.
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All right, cool. So, we're now standing in what we call Lighthouse Miami. So, we got out of the swag room. Um, and so, Lighthouse Miami is what we established here in Miami. It's about a 40,000 square foot facility where we have most of our engineering team, uh, some light manufacturing, and we have the showroom back there that I'll show you outside. And we started out here um, after moving two times in Miami. We've been constantly kind of outgrowing our space. And I think we're at the limit of this space, too. So, we might have to move out of here soon as well. But um, we call it the lighthouse because one of the elements of our product is actually a Fresnel lens. And so, as I was telling you, the Fresnel lenses are used, um, one of the applications for them is in an actual lighthouse. So, you can kind of use a Fresnel lens two ways. You can take light that's coming from a wide source like the sun and then focus it onto one point. Or alternatively, you can take a point source and kind of beam it out. And that's what lighthouses do. So, we call this lighthouse because we actually added some light to it. Before this, it was dark. Um, and yeah, it's really cool space now that the team's using to do our development and testing and also other functions are here as well. So, what we're going to do is we're going to start actually in the second warehouse. So, we have two warehouses here. And I'll show you some of the components that go into what makes the P3. And then we'll walk across to the other side and go outside and see the production units that are out there. Um, for context, this is one of the earlier prototypes that we built. Just the actual version of that model that you saw there. And um, we're right now using it as a history piece and uh... Is this the actual size or... Yeah. So, this is a 40-ft shipping container. Essentially, um, this is of course now empty and we're not using it. We're just using it, uh, as you can see every year just to write down the names of folks who joined us. So, hopefully... Yeah. We'll keep on going. All right, let's have fun.
Do you play padel? Yeah. So, this is Ultra. This is... Ultra? Oh, so we're in Magic City. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah. So, this is the largest padel court in Miami, of course. Oh, that's so fun. Yeah, so um, on this side uh, we originally started doing some light manufacturing and assembly. Now, we've repurposed it to extended R&D. One of the coolest things we set up here is this kind of room here. I'll show you. This is a solar simulator. This is the largest solar simulator of its kind in the world. Uh, so, it's state-of-the-art. And what that means is we essentially have the sun indoors. So, that allows us to do 24/7 testing. So, I can show you what it looks like. That's an image of it from uh... Do you uh, can you get tan in there? Can you also use this as a tanning bed? You can get very tan, yeah. Yes. Um, inside here and they're doing some uh, construction on it. You see, you have these uh, lamps essentially. And they're going to be beaming light. It gets so hot that the paint will actually chip off. Yeah, people don't expect to see a company like this in Miami. No, I'm used to this in El Segundo. It's actually I'm getting very excited right now. Like, is that a CNC machine? Yeah, yeah. People are like, "Wow, you can do this in Miami?" That's so cool. Yeah. Whenever we say we're in Miami, people think we're at the beach and you know... No, this is hardcore. So, I want to show you the lenses here just to begin with. Um, so, this is again, as I mentioned, it's called a Fresnel lens. So, this is the first element of our system. Uh, what a Fresnel lens is, is think of it as a giant magnifying glass. So, you know, you have this curvature of the lens. And if you flatten it, you kind of get these grooves. So, if you touch this, you feel that there are some grooves there. So, that's kind of the uh, corresponding to the curvature of the lens. And so, this essentially focuses the light coming in from the sun onto the battery material. It gets very hot and then stores that energy. So, um, essentially our battery is a heat battery. And what that means is we're heating up uh, rocks, right? And then storing that energy in the form of heat, which is very cheap as compared to doing uh, lithium ion or any other type of electrochemical battery. And you don't have to get lithium or magnesium or cobalt or any of these other fancy chemicals. So, that's why we chose a heat battery. And this allows us to essentially, as I said, capture the incoming light in form of heat, store it in form of heat over longer durations up to 5 days per cell, and then dispatch it around the clock for data center applications. And so, the way we do that is... You can see some units here in the back. So, we have these blowers. So, the blowers are, think of it as like your oven, right? When you put something in convective mode, there's a fan spinning that's basically blowing air through the system. They're blowing air through the rocks and then they're bringing it to our engine. So, that's the engine, one of the engines brings it to the engine heat exchanger. And then that's essentially a Stirling engine. I'll show you what a Stirling engine is. It's a very simple engine, a 200-year-old technology, very reliable. Um, hundreds of millions of hours of run time on it. And um, that's what produces electricity. And so, you kind of combine these together, string them along, and then you can get to any power profile or any energy profile you need. The simplest way of explaining the technology um, is like the 5-year-old version is imagine if you're out in the woods or at the beach and you find a rock, right? And you grab the rock and you have a magnifying glass in your pocket. And then you hold the magnifying glass to the sun and then you heat up the rock. The rock's going to get hot. You just wrap that in a blanket and put it in your pocket. That's kind of your battery. And then you stick a Stirling engine on it, which I'll show you. And that's going to basically just start uh, running based off that heat uh, differential and make electricity. So, that's really what we do. It's not really rocket science. Uh, but it's rock science. It's rock science, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Now, so we'll show you some of the rocks as well. I love a good dad joke. So, what are the rocks? Like, what type of rocks are they? You can use any kind of rocks. Uh, we have developed a specialized rock that can handle the temperature profiles and go through the cycles a lot. But we're maintaining the rocks at about 800°C to 1,000°C. So, that's, you know, equivalent to about 2,000°F. And um, you can use any rocks. Riverbed rocks, you could use fancy ceramics. There's nothing that's necessarily um, uh, secret to what kind of rocks you use. What's really important is how you transfer the heat to it, make sure that you've done testing to make sure that the rocks don't break over time and they can handle the cycles. And that's a lot of the testing that we've been doing and have done and developed our material around it. But the most important thing is if you think about the raw materials that we use at the end of the day, it's essentially sand and dirt and steel, right? And so, the sand is essentially quartz that's converted to the lenses, to the insulation that we use, to even the rocks essentially. And same with the dirt. And then the steel is just for the enclosures and the engine parts. Um, and really nothing fancy about it. And that's really one of the key uh, value props here is that you can make this domestically using very simple raw materials. And you don't have to go import something from China. Um, and that's really important because you think about we're building the backbone of our AI infrastructure on borrowed technology, right? And so, we're trying to do this here domestically. And I think uh, we're just getting started. So, we have lots of room to grow, but there's a very clear path to how we can support data center growth and in general other power applications, heat applications, industrial applications at the multi-gigawatt scale very soon. This is the other side where we uh, do a lot of R&D. Just to tell you why I said this is a production studio. So, this room you see here, this was a projection studio. So, this is where the projector was. That's the kind of opening where the projector was. And inside there was a like a movie, like a cinema. Yeah, screening studio, yeah. So, um, anyways, we've got lots of various R&D components here that I can talk you through. But the main highlight is if we go outside, we can show you actually uh, how it all comes together. We're uh, currently uh, maintaining some of the machines. So, all of it is not running, but I'll show you kind of the elements of it as we go outside. Again, you ask like, "Why in Miami?" People don't expect to see this in Miami. But the fact is, first of all, you have the sun, which you wouldn't otherwise have in San Francisco all the time. Second of all, you've got a lot of great talent uh, because South Florida is actually the center of a lot of the energy activity in the US. Like, the largest energy company or renewable energy company in the country is here. And then you got a lot of data center developers also in South Florida as well. So, we've got lots of great talent, lots of great investors. And um, yeah, lots of great stuff to show you here. But I'm going to put on my sunglasses because otherwise I'll get a headache. Uh, but yeah, so what you see here is how this all comes together. So, you've got the lens table at the top, right? So, each one of these is sitting on a 20-ft skid. So, inside you saw a 40-ft skid. We've now downsized it to a 20-ft skid for ease of handling and manufacturing. And then that light is getting focused onto the battery cells or the rocks. That's essentially in these enclosures. And then we blow air using the blowers that you saw into this uh, first shipping container here. That's essentially where the PCU, the power conversion unit engine sits. And then that air gets looped back in. So, it's not like we're taking ambient air and then heating it up and then making electricity out of it. It's actually that we are uh, cycling the air every day about 200° C. So, we're going from 600 to 800 and 800 to 1,000° C, and that's what's helping run the engine. Uh, so, it's high temperature, but not extremely high temperature where you've seen some... Yeah, some companies make batteries that are 2,000 or 3,000° C. So, this is uh, what we have today. And then the optical table again, of course, tracks the sun. Right now, this is not hooked to the grid, but rather our EV chargers. You can see the Rivian charger here. Actually... Oh, wow. If we go um, to the other side, I'll show you some other cool test stuff that we're doing. Uh, if you come inside here, we have these containerized engine test stands. So, these are test stands that can run around the clock for our various engines. They're currently, as you can see, fixing one of the test stands, but uh, we build these because they can be separated from the building and we can run them all the time without having to worry about any like security or safety issues. And I will... Here, you have another test stand, which um, is used for essentially various temperature profiles that we run the battery at. Um, and um, I'll show you what's inside here when we go inside. So, this is an engine running. You can see the engine at the very far back as you come around. That thing at the far end is the engine. And then all these pipes are just blowing hot air into it. So, this is inside that shipping container that I showed you is a similar setup where we're just getting the hot air from the battery cells or rocks into the engine. Right now, this is just doing it from the ambient using heaters. Yeah. We can uh, close this for safety. Surprise. Like, every time you open a different container, there's like a little city inside. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
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We have rocks here, lots of rocks. I'm not collecting them, yeah. Yeah. If you come here to the left... Gosh, this space is huge. Yeah, it's about, as I said, 40,000 sq ft. Um, so, as I mentioned, this is kind of what we're talking about, uh, various rocks. Um, this is where you heat up and store the energy in. And essentially, the rest of the stuff you see also, this is our materials lab. We have various kind of devices here for testing. We have ovens, we have all sorts of microscopes and everything else, but we have a um, where's our cabinet? Yeah, we have various rock samples, as you can see, uh, here as well. Um, but yeah, this is essentially um, how the Exowatt P3 works. And really, the vision and idea is to scale this to the millions and billions of units. We started productionizing this first generation that you saw outside last year, and now we're working on the next generation that's even simpler and cheaper, and going to scale that uh, significantly this year to ship to uh, some of our hyperscaler customer projects. Um, we've been very fortunate to have a backlog of over 10 gigawatts at this point working with the leading hyperscalers. And I know that sounds like a lot, but um, you know, the pace at which data centers are now building, it's not a lot anymore. When we started the company 3 years ago, I remember and I was new to the data center world, like a big data center, I think the largest data center at that point was 100 MW. Mhm. And uh, like a rack was like 50 kW or 100 kW at most, and even less than that. And um, you know, when we're talking to customers, it was like, "Oh, we're building in 25 MW blocks or something like that." And then as time went by, the largest data center became like a gigawatt, and then recently now it's become 10 gigawatts, right? And it keeps on growing, and then the racks keep on getting more energy dense from like 50 kW to now people are building racks that are a megawatt, which is insane. And sometimes people say, "Well, um, I don't think people contextualize how much energy that is. So, if you talk about a gigawatt data center, that's almost a million US households of energy. So, if a data center says I'm building a 5 gigawatt data center, they're basically building a city that's 5 million households, and they're building in a very tiny footprint, although not so tiny. The funny thing about data centers is um, when they start talking about buildings in acres, you can start realizing how big these buildings are. So, like a 5 gigawatt data center itself, the building, not the power infrastructure, nothing else, is going to be 5,000 acres. Oh my god. So, that's just the building for the data center. And then you have all the other infrastructure around it. And I don't think people really appreciate how big these buildings are, because historically, data centers were built normally around urban suburban areas. That's why you have a lot in Virginia and in North Carolina and Chicago and other places like that. Uh, because the biggest data center was maybe 100 MW. Typically, data centers were like 20, 30 MW. And the typical approach was, "Well, I'm going to build a data center. I don't really have to think about power, because I'm just going to plug it into the grid, and there's going to be power." It was really never this constraint of power uh, as an equation. And now, as data centers have become bigger and bigger and bigger, and the hyperscalers want to invest more and more, um, as you've probably seen, like the Googles of the world and so on and so forth, they're planning on investing a trillion dollars in CapEx in data centers over the next couple years. That means that you have to uh, consume more power, and the grid is just really not built for that. And what that means is the data centers now have to figure out how to bring their own power online, because it's also important that um, you know, when you plug in a data center, it consumes a lot of power from the grid, which also means you and I, as ratepayers, will have to pay for that additional infrastructure that has to be built to support that. And I think that's become a big issue today in the US, where, you know, these data centers are being built, and they're harming the communities, they're increasing the energy prices, they're taking the scarce resources that the communities have, like water, and now we're seeing a shift to building data centers that are no longer connected to grid. I 2 or 3 years ago, it would have been a sin or impossible to tell a data center customer, "We're going to make a behind-the-meter power generation asset." Behind-the-meter being like uh, or off-grid being you're not connected to grid, you're not flowing through the grid. But, you know, over last year, you've probably seen that's become, you know, norm. And unfortunately, most of these customers are using natural gas generators to power the data center, because it's available, and you know, that gas is whatever, you just burn some gas, and you can make electricity. It's certainly not cheap. It's of course not sustainable. And um, as you can... If you think about the context of like the war we're in right now, it's not really a good idea to bet your data center power on a gas backbone. So, what Exowatt is really doing, our mission is to build a solar backbone, which is free energy, right? The sun is free, it's available. You can power the entire US 100,000 times over with tiny speck of land of solar panels. Um, even Elon Musk famously said that a couple years ago and a couple of times. And um, the only kind of pushback sometimes we get is like, "Well, solar takes a lot of land." But, the reality is we have so much land. 41% of the US is empty, like zero people live there, according to the Census Bureau. So, land is really not a constraint. I think it's going to be also good for the communities to not go build data centers in the metro areas where people live, and it's going to affect them, affect their health, affect their energy prices, to go to these barren land areas and build these data center projects. And just recently, we launched an initiative that we call Exowatt which is to go develop these land sites and build multi-gigawatt data centers on top of them. So, that's something that we're super excited about. Our chief data center officer, Nick, who recently joined us, is leading that effort. And you'll be hearing a lot of those projects coming online in the next year, I would say. We'll have some news there for sure. Wow. So, in terms of the funding side of Exowatt, how much have you raised to date and who are your investors? Yeah, we've been super fortunate to have the best investors back the company. So, as I mentioned, we launched it from a venture studio called Atomic. They initially gave us the pre-seed funding, if you will. And then in 2024, we came out of stealth and we raised our seed round, which was led by Katherine Boyle at Andreessen and Sam Altman. Um, and uh, then later that year, about 6 months later, we raised our Series A. Um, and that was led by Felicis and then 8090 and MVP. So, in total, we've raised about $140 million. Um, over the last 2 years and it's been great. I mean, we've got tons of great investors with tons of knowledge about the industry and also very deep pockets to help us scale the business. But, if we think about how do we take this to the next level and how do we deploy multi-gigawatt scale projects, we'll need even more funding. And so, we're going to be making some announcements on that front very soon as well. Oh, interesting. Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah. So, with investors like Sam Altman, how are you working with strategic partners? And I don't know if it extends just to OpenAI, but these other hyperscalers that are customers, how are you strategically being involved and what have you learned from them? Yeah, I mean, we've been very fortunate to be able to talk directly to all the hyperscalers, learn about their needs, learn about kind of how we can support them and have relationships with all of them. We haven't announced any of these projects publicly, the commercial projects that we have with them, but hopefully soon we can talk about them as well. Um, but it's been a learning experience for me. I have an energy background. I understand how power works. Um, but just how data centers consume power has been a learning experience for us. And I think it's also been a shifting, evolving story. Just as I said, just where they take power from is one topic and then how that power is consumed is another topic. And especially when you think about data centers not only consuming a lot of power, but if it's an inference data center or a training data center, they also consume that in a not necessarily base load way. So, people think, "Oh, data centers are base load." Means like you have a flat load. But, it's not like that. It's like going like this all the time. And there's a lot of power electronics that you have to develop to actually handle those transients. And we've been learning about that and developing our own kind of solutions towards that as well. And yeah, we're really excited to support these hyperscalers in the projects that are coming online next couple of years. I really hope that we can scale our business as fast as possible to do that to build the sustainable infrastructure, because otherwise we're going to be left with tens or even yeah, tens of gigawatts of natural gas burners that are going to last for another 20 years. And it might be a quick fix now, but um, I think the hyperscalers know they're going to pay a price for this later both in terms of penalties for emissions and also just the cost of energy that's going to go up. So, the sooner we can get this to the market and scale it in a very significant way, the better everyone will be off. And then they'll start their carbon offset campaigns a little bit more to make up for that. Yeah, that's an unfortunate fact that is kind of like gone out of the vocabulary of all the hyperscalers is there's no more like sustainability is our priority. You know, it used to be one of the objectives, but it's now time to power, right? I need power. I don't care how you make it, you know, squeeze penguins if you have to and I need the power. And then second to that is like the cost of power. That's all to be honest, they secondary at this point. Data centers are in so desperate the AI race is so intense that cost is kind of like secondary for the most part. Third, fourth, and fifth are other things probably. And then sixth or seventh is now like I want to make sure it's sustainable. Um, and that's an unfortunate thing. It doesn't have to be that way, but we're here to fix that. Given and you did mention this a bit beforehand, but given you're so close to the actual buildout of these data centers, you understand where they are in this cycle and adoption and that kind of thing, what are the biggest misconceptions or I guess hidden truths about where we are right now in the world of data center adoption? I yeah, I think um, the there's a lot of headlines about data center projects being planned or initiated. I don't think all of them are actually happening. So, there's a lot of like phantom data centers that are being um, announced. Let's call it that way. I think um, data centers are definitely in a rush to get online fast. They do have massive supply chain constraints. 2 years ago it was maybe Nvidia GPUs, now it's power. And now it's actually not even hardware, it's actually labor. So, the biggest kind of challenge for data centers today is there aren't enough construction workers to build a data center. So, you have to like import people from other states to a site to build a data center. And being an electrician these days is actually very high-paying job because there aren't enough electricians to even twist wires and you know, just hook things up. So, I think um, you know, some people always think that there's a bubble and this all is going to go away, but the reality is if you look at the CAPEX budgets and the spend that's happening from the hyperscalers, it's very large and it's pretty much planned for next couple years. So, I would say until 2030, there's no doubt that this is going to continue to scale at this rate. The question is like what happens after 2030 and is it going to continue beyond that? But, data centers are super expensive, by the way. You could kind of say rule of thumb, 1 gigawatt data center or per gigawatt, you have to spend about $50 million of CAPEX. Which is an insane number to think about, right? Um, you know, I was talking when you talk to folks in the industry, they're like, "Yeah, it's the same numbers more or less that we had like 3 or 4 years ago. It just has a couple more zeros behind it. It just becomes larger and larger and larger." To the point where even the hyperscalers want to go get debt to fund this because they don't want to maybe they don't even have the capability to fund this from their balance sheets. But, yeah, the data center buildout is happening. I think what we're trying to really influence is to make sure that it's done sustainably. We're trying to make sure that it's done outside of urban and suburban areas where it could affect the communities. You know, I talked about energy crisis. The other aspect is really health. If you think about they're burning diesel, they're burning gas in the gigawatts. This is going to have a real health impact for people living around those data centers. So, we're I think we've got the kind of solution here. Now, it's really about scaling and adopting it at scale and bring this online very quickly. So, through all of this and building Exowatt to what it is today, what were the biggest lessons that you learned early in your career? Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, I used to work at Tesla for the launch of the Model S when the Fremont factory was getting built and it was an amazing, eye-opening experience. Uh, Tesla wasn't a popular company. We had to fight for a lot of currents to uphill to get there, but kind of really the lessons learned were to first of all have an amazing, dedicated, mission-focused team. Like I think that's the primary ingredient that actually got Tesla through. The second one is to build a great product that customers really want and enjoy. And that's something I also learned at YC, right? From Sam. Build something people want. Um, and then really hardware is hard. So, you want to try to figure out how to create the shortest feedback loops possible and learn from that as fast as possible and scale that as fast as possible. And that's kind of why we chose this modular approach instead of going and building a giant infrastructure project and saying, "Well, we need 10 years and a billion dollars to get to our first demo site." We said, "Let's build the smallest thing, learn from that, iterate quickly, and build the next generation, next generation, do that quickly and fast." And then last thing about, you know, everyone coming out of Tesla, you know, you're obsessed with vertical integration. You want to build everything in-house. We haven't done that at Exowatt to that extent yet. We've started working with contract manufacturers because we know we need to scale fast quickly. So, they have that infrastructure. But, you know, Elon uh, really taught us how to vertically integrate everything and build it yourself and build it better, faster, cheaper, and don't take no for an answer. Yeah. Amazing. Well, it's awesome to see everything that you've built and not only like how cool it is to be involved in this next generation of the AI super cycle, but do it in a sustainable way and create a ton of jobs here in Miami. Yes. Yeah, exactly. That's the other thing I forgot to mention about data centers. Data center buildout itself creates some construction jobs, but after it's built, there's not a lot of jobs that are required to maintain it. But, we're building factories to build the infrastructure for those data centers and those are going to create tens of thousands of jobs per factory. So, I'm really excited about that as we continue to vertically integrate into the future to create a lot of jobs for all the communities that we're going to be building with. Amazing. Thanks so much. So much for coming, Lily.
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