What does Sandbox AQ do and what do you think about quantum computing?
Sandbox AQ, A for AI, Q for quantum. This is ultimately the twin engines of the transformation of our society. What technology has done for us is model our world and then be able to change our world using the data from that modeling. The AI and quantum coming together gives us a new superpower and it's upon us in the next four or five years. 2030 is my prediction where I think we'll have the kind of impact that is business impact, societal impact. It's not going to be winner takes all.
These non-intuitive, non-human domains. The AI with the training data is just as good or better there. It's not replacing humans. It's adding things that we otherwise couldn't do.
Once the capability is there, we'll have an explosion of imagination. Is there going to be that moment where people go, 'Oh my god'? I think it's going to be when... Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
All right, everybody. Welcome to our Moonshots episode. We're going to be recording an episode here in Riyadh at FII9 of our Moonshots podcast. I'm very pleased to be joined by our Moonshot mates, Salem Ismail, the head of Exo. See, welcome. Let's give it up for Salem Ismail, everybody. Pretty welcome. All right. Right here. Dave Blodwen, my other Moonshot mate. Give it up for Dave Blodwen. Dave. All right, buddy. And as a special guest, we have here Jack Hidary, the CEO of Sandbox AQ. Jack, bring it up.
Jack, I can always count on you to bring the hat and the energy.
And the energy, for sure. Woo. Let's do it. A fusion power source. Let's do it.
So in our moonshot conversation today, gentlemen, I want to cover three subjects. I want you to bring all of it to the table. Don't hold back. We're in the middle of this incredible location with 6,000 of our closest friends. Quick question. How many of you in the audience have listened to the podcast? Just show fans. All right. A lot of fans. A lot of fans. Amazing. Okay. So, this is a conversation on three subjects today. The first is energy. The second is robotics. And we're going to wrap up because we've got Jack here on quantum. So, let's begin with energy. The question ultimately is what do we do with abundant energy? And let me just look at my notes here one moment. So today China has added 429 gigawatts of new power in 2024 as opposed to the US at 51 gigawatts of power. There is an electron gap that's significant. We're seeing the emergence of small modular reactors, SMRs. We're seeing basically corporations going out and buying their own nuclear power sources, investing in Gen 4 fission, investing in fusion. By my last count, there's 37 fusion VC-backed companies that are in production, but we're still woefully inadequately short in the United States and most of the world for energy. What are your thoughts, Jack? Can I kick us off?
Sure. Well, Peter, it's fascinating in energy right now. We're in a very odd, limited period of scarcity. And so, we're not seeing the big picture, which is abundance is coming very soon. Somebody wrote a book about abundance. Who? Okay. Right now, if you look at, for example, gas turbines, 40% of electricity in the United States, about 35% in Europe is supplied by gas. An increasing amount here in the Gulf is moving to gas as well. What is the wait time right now to get a gas turbine? Something that looks like a propeller that allows you to make electricity. I'll take bids starting at 6 months. What's the wait time for getting a gas turbine? Three years. Two years. Five years. Five years. It's four and a half years right now. So GE, Mitsubishi Heavy, and Siemens are the producers. Four-year wait. They're not willing to actually make more capacity because the last time they did, they got burned. And so that's not happening. So we have this little odd period where there's lots of data centers, lots of AI demand, OpenAI, Stargates, all kinds of stuff happening, but you can't—it's very hard to make it happen. What's going to happen starting though in 7, 8, 9 years is we're going to flip the script to abundance. And what's going to happen is the SMRs that you just mentioned, Peter, on the nuclear side are kicking in. Other nuclear kicking in. Various governments right now are about to build factories to make more turbines. And so that's really going to be fixed as well. And then in terms of solar and batteries, we're going to see step function change. Right now, we're at about 27% efficiency in terms of photons, light going to electricity in solar panels. That's going to move up because of material science breakthroughs, because of quantum.
I'll give you another story exactly supporting what you said. I took a tour of the biggest quantum data center in America. And Jeff Markley had just built this thing and he tried to buy 5 gigawatt generators. They're sold out. There are none. So he bought every 3 gigawatt generator that was left. So then he bought a million valves. I said, 'What are you going to do with a million valves?' He's like, 'Well, look, it's all liquid cooled. I'm going to need the valves, but the last time I tried to build something, everything was sold out. I'm not taking that chance anymore. I'm going to buy a million valves and be ready.' So some valve manufacturing company just became a unicorn overnight.
Can I get a hand mic for Jack over here, please? See, what do we do with abundant energy? So, let's go to Jack Hidary's thesis. You know, 7, 8, 10 years from now, we've got more capacity of energy than we've ever been able to use. Yeah. What are we doing with it?
Well, I think there it's very hard to project, right? We've had 10,000 years of civilization on a scarcity of energy and suddenly we flip to abundance. We're going to have this amazing challenge of thinking through what do we do with it. If you have abundant energy, desalination becomes largely much less expensive, right? If you have fresh water, you take out half of all the infectious diseases in the world. The ripple effects start to propagate. Energy tips everything. Energy tips everything. Food becomes easy. And so the ripple effects are so profound. We have to rethink all of society. Think about the idea that the last 100 years almost all the wars have been fought over oil, right? So hopefully we should have less wars. We're human beings so we'll find other things to fight about. But it will decrease the need for overt aggression in the way we have. How many countries in the world do we have dependent on the petrodollar? Russia, Venezuela, you know, obviously here in the Middle East, probably about 40. And so what happens to their economies when we've got abundant energy from everything else? Huge impact.
I mean take Canada, right? I'm Canadian. 40% of exports are oil. When do we have abundant solar or other technologies, the marginal cost of extraction there is like $50 a barrel. Here it's like $7 a barrel. So there's no way the expensive countries are going to be able to compete on oil in the future. So it'll be moving—the geopolitics is crazy. One thesis I have is that the reason Russia invaded Ukraine is in a few years, 70% of exports of oil and gas are not going to be worth much. They have to...
Peter, just to add to Salem's point, mentioned it in passing, want to double click on the healthcare implications. 50% of all the hospital beds occupied in the continent of Africa are due to bad water, due to infections and bacteria and viruses carried by water, related to water, mosquitoes also, standing water. So once you have fresh water because of abundant energy, then suddenly you free up huge amounts of the healthcare system and people become much healthier. And so just the implications for water and then the downstream effect of healthcare is already multi-trillion in nature, not multi-billion, in terms of its effect. And then when you think about what you can do in terms of transport, transport is expensive because of energy. And so if you can now transport stuff from place to place, you again change global economics. So, I don't think we're ready. I don't think the global political leaders have really taken into account what's going to happen starting 6, 7 years from now when we flip from scarcity to abundance here.
Closing thought, Dave, on energy.
Yeah. Well, so you know, we're right here in Saudi Arabia. Saudi is playing the cards absolutely perfectly because the way this will play out is that the data centers are moving to where the energy is. So, this is a brand new thing in the world. The energy used to need to move to the population, hence all the tankers. You know, the oil has to go there. But that doesn't work with—it doesn't have to work that way with the AI. The AI can come to the energy. So, there's huge amounts of natural gas that gets wasted. There's huge amounts of oil that is expensive to export. Why not data center here? And there's—what's the quote on solar energy here? Was it you saying—no, it was Emaad that was telling us about it earlier? Emaad, what's the quote on solar energy? So, I can repeat it. Three. So the solar energy here in Saudi is three times cheaper than it is in the United States.
I was going to say ACWA Power, the largest deployer of solar and wind, is a Saudi company. People think of Saudi as only oil. Not the case.
Yeah. Second of the energy. Once the data centers are built, you're locked and loaded. The data center is not going to move. These are massive capital investments. Once that's on the ground, no matter what happens with fusion, you're good to go.
Fascinating. And then you have Bill Gross building the energy storage system. Bill Gross. And then off you go there. We'll hear from him in a little bit. Let's move to our second subject which is the world of humanoid robotics, embodied intelligence. You know, last year I was on stage here on the main stage here with Elon talking about robots. His prediction is 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040 and a price point of, you know, 20 to $30,000. We heard yesterday, today I interviewed Dr. Robert Playter, the CEO of Boston Dynamics. Tomorrow I'm interviewing the team from 1X. Today 1X announced their pricing on their Neo Gamma robot. They're selling it at $20,000 and they're going to be leasing it at $499 a month. Now, this is before we've gone into production, right? When we get to millions of robots, tens and hundreds of millions of robots, we're going to see the price come down at these price points. Think about, you know, $10 a day, 40 cents an hour for labor. Labor running GPT-5, 6 or 7 or, you know, Grok 10 super intelligence. What do you guys think about robots coming? Jack, just to kick off.
The first five factories where robots are building robots have begun construction. There's two in the US, there's three in China. And so they're not ready yet. They're not in production, but these factories will be ready in the next 6, 12, 18 months. And that's where you begin to get some of the kind of scale that Elon's talking about. Not sure about the number he had, but the point is it's directionally correct. They're the iPhone production scales. That's right. And when robots can make robots, now we're in a whole different ballgame. And the second thing you add, of course, is that the LLMs, the software side's getting better, and that software gets implanted in the embodied robot. And therefore, the kind of programming we thought we had to do back when a lot of us were thinking about robotics on this stage here a number of years ago, we thought, wow, the coding, the programming—no, that's out the window because we now have an intelligence that can see something and do something. And so this is a very different future where at FII we can make a prediction right now: FII two years from now there'll be quite a few robots walking amongst us, maybe even some on stage presenting. And I think that's going to have a profound impact in terms of first, initially, warehouse logistics, profound impact on that whole sector there. And then also in hospitals, we're seeing already penetration of about 20% of hospitals in America have some kind of robotic helper—not for medicine, not for surgery, but for the mundane things in hospitals, bringing up the towels, the linens, the food, the medicine, things like that. But eventually, we're heading towards surgery, right? We're getting there, but right now already adoption today. If you go to hospitals in America, you'll see a 20% adoption right now. Imagine when they're better and humanoid.
I don't buy it. Okay, I have three points. One, I totally agree with the industrial use of robots. Massive opportunities especially for the dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. I think supply chain issues are much deeper than people think. So I don't see how we could end up with a billion robots down the line, at least in the foreseeable future. I think it's going to take a lot longer to get there. I am coming around to the software adaptation side. These things are going to learn very, very quickly. But as I said on our last podcast, can we please get the Roomba working at least before we start thinking about all sorts of other household tasks? I think industrial uses where we start and have a profound penetration there before you bring it into the home. And your idea of a robot per room, I don't think that's going to happen. To your point, my household is the last place. Thank you.
I agree 100%. The amount of variables in a house—dogs walking, running around, kids—there are way more variables in a house than any factory on this planet, which is by the way why, for example, 1X wants to go in the house. They want to have enough of a variety where they can pick up and get data and learn, right? We've sucked up every single data point. They may injure some kids on the way, but they're going to learn. Yes.
Point. One thought from our last podcast, you know, we had that little video of the robot kickboxing. Yes. From a marketing perspective, it feels to me like kickboxing is not the first task you should show a robot doing. It should be the—yeah, massage. Have it vacuuming the floors. Have it cleaning the dishes. I don't want a kickboxing robot standing next to me. That's going to be unnerving. You want to convey a sense of safety and comfort, not UFC in the house. Oh my god. Dave, thoughts.
So, we talked about the only reason they're humanoid at all and don't have six arms like you want is because it inspires people. And when they kickbox, it inspires me. And this is where China is running away with the robot Olympics. Yeah, it's like it's inspirational. And watching soccer games through robots, it's inspirational.
Let's talk about the China of it all. Peter, you had some export stats.
Yeah, I do. So, here's what's going on, right? There are two hotbeds of robot manufacturing. The United States has got probably about 30 humanoid robot companies. We hear about the top five or six, but there's a long tail here. China is at least that. You know, I'm putting out my humanoid robot report in about a week's time and we're tracking on the order of 100 humanoid robots, a lot of them out of China. And it's interesting, right, as China goes out to the world, and I understand why, and provides, you know, free open-source AI models. We're having those models adopted by country after country. In the Chinese robot space, what we're seeing is that it's the up-and-coming countries that are not technologically forward like Poland, Mexico, Russia, and Vietnam that are buying Chinese robots. Yeah. So Poland is 1700% increase in robots coming in from China. Mexico is at 275%, Russia 135, and Vietnam 114. The countries which are technologically forward—South Korea, Germany, US—are not importing the Chinese robots.
