Well, Kardashev, you know, we're talking 30 years in the future for everything to be in space, but between here and 30 years it's mostly terrestrial, and we're not going to get another chance to have a guy who has 6 gigawatts locked up to pick his brain. I mean, this is such an incredibly brilliant investment. But we know, you know, from I don't know, Chamath, if you're invested in Positron or Light Queue, or we have our company Lightwave, there's a lot of efficiency coming to data centers.
And as the chip costs get undercut by new designs, the power costs are still there. And so right now when people build these data centers, they think, 'Oh, well, it's only 10% power cost. The other 90% all goes to Nvidia.' But that's going to invert, and the power costs will still be there.
So I think between here and 30 years from now, Elon is exactly right. The currency that is most dominant in that next 30-year window is wattage and tonnage. Tonnage to build the data centers, wattage to power them. But I think if you can find a power supply today, it's the investment theme of the decade by far. And Chamath, I'd love to get your thoughts on, like, you got an early start on this. I don't know if you did it secretly or how it accumulated, but love to get your insights for the audience.
I think the way to think about it is when you look at load growth, just take the United States because I think that's a more tractable example. When you look at the load growth and you look at the sources of load growth, they're relatively pedestrian. It's more electric cars, more electric fridges, more electric televisions, PCs, laptops, and data centers, but it's just broadly speaking that we are more of an electrified society. So there's just like this, you know, this demand of a need for electrons, basically.
And then when you look on the supply side, there's huge issues even if you assume that every project that's planned actually gets not only permitted and green-lit, but also built on time and on budget. And when you net those two things out, by 2050 we're still 1.4 terawatt hours short, which is effectively six California's worth of electricity. So there is no world in which we catch up. And then people's reflexive reaction to that is, 'But nuclear.' And I'm like, well, I just think like, you know, the problem with SMRs as an example is the S in the MR. It's like, you know, what people don't realize is it's the same unit effort to get an SMR as an MR approved, or as an R approved, as an LR approved, a large reactor.
Because, you know, you're going through state, local ordinances and people and conflicts and pushback and all of this stuff that does not change whether the form factor is it goes under your daughter's bed or it sits, you know, over there and it's gigantic. So we're just massively short, and that's where my thesis started, which was just that observation. Then, you know, where I spent a little bit of, well, not a little bit, a lot of my time was what is the most tractable all-of-the-above solution set? Because, you know, once you realize that we're so short, you immediately abandon all of the rhetoric around climate change because you're like, just give me anything: oil, natural gas, coal, wind, solar, nuclear. And if you look at them all on just a total, you know, cost basis, what jumps off the page is solar is slightly a little bit more expensive than wind, but they're the cheapest, but it's just much faster. It's 2 years, it's do no harm, it's plonk it on the ground and off you go.
So I spent just a bunch of time accumulating solar assets. And then that accidentally led me into the data centers because it was like, you know, through Nvidia and Grok, what I realized was, my gosh, the capacity build-out was so upside down because of all these constraints. Because the data center is like this incredibly temporal moment where all energy, and energy meaning like people's energy, ire, anger, they all meet right there. And so, you know, you have the permitting issues, you have the pushback issues, you have the political issues, you have pushback against the oligarchy, you have capitalism, you have wealth inequality, all concentrated in that thing. And so, you know, about 2 years ago I started to kind of parcel together assets that I thought would be valuable in a world where that looks like it is the scarcest asset.
Yeah, it wasn't cheap. It wasn't cheap. But, and by the way, just to be clear, there's huge issues with that. Meaning, even when you have these assets, when you actually try to get them turned on and get them built, my gosh, it's incredibly complicated. The funding cycle is very complicated. The supply chain is very complicated. The labor shortages on critical people because these are licensed, you know, skilled workers. You can't just, you know, grab some bumpkin off the street or go to like, you know, I don't know, Craigslist. Like, I mean, you have to go and find like a licensed master electrician. They're very, very hard to find. They cost a lot of money. When you start to put all of this stuff together, we are probably going to see a massive, massive, massive compute shortage in the next 3 or 4 years. Massive.
All this, all this whole, look, I do think that we have achieved AGI. It cannot diffuse. And the reason it cannot diffuse has nothing to do with the technology. It has everything to do with the build-out. And until you actually build it out so everybody can feel it or a plurality of human beings can feel it, it's just something that exists in a lab. Now, that has value. Don't get me wrong. But I would not underestimate the difficulty. And if you look at, for example, the Anthropic S1 that just dropped today, it's shocking to me that the claim that they have to put as a risk factor, which I would never have thought would have happened for a company growing this fast and so powerful with all this money, the hyperscalers will not give them compute.
