SOSV Climate Tech Summit | Chris Sacca: Why He Is (Still) Betting Big on Climate Tech

Yeah. So, Lower Carbon is a multi-billion dollar fund. We might be the most active, if not among the most active, investors in early stage climate tech. That spans basically every aspect, every technology, every part of the economy that is carbonized right now. We're looking to decarbonize it because frankly, carbon is expensive. So anytime we take it out of a process or a product or a service, we find an opportunity to profit. But we also invest in some later stage stuff, particularly we double, triple, quadruple down into our favorite portfolio companies, the high-flyers, and then opportunistically pick off stuff we see out there too.

I'd say a few billion. Every time I come to you, we're basically actively fundraising at all times.

Electrons are the ballgame right now, just moving electrons around. Whether that's in terms of generating across energy. So we have the world's only dedicated fusion fund. I'll just say this because it's public record now as a result of being in a state meeting, but we are out talking with investors about our second fusion fund. Fusion is this thing that had a bad rap for decades. We would hear 'Fusion's 30 years off and always will be.' But we try to address everything we can with fresh eyes. When we went and started hanging out in the actual fusion labs, we started looking over our shoulder. Anyone who is dismissing this technology clearly hasn't been in the lab. They haven't seen the throughput. They haven't seen the net energy happening as a result of these ignitions and reactions. Earlier in my career, I might have spent more time trying to convince people of this. Instead, this time we just started buying it all. What we're seeing is across multiple diverse approaches to fusion, incredible success. Exponential growth, and in some cases double exponential where the exponent is...

The key metric in fusion is the Q value. Quite simply, the Q value is: are you getting more energy out of the reaction than you put in? It's happening. When we raised our first fusion fund, we called it 'Q is greater than one.' That was the holy grail of fusion. That's literally the name of the fund. Four months after we announced that fund and raised it, Q greater than one was announced as achieved at a lab called the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore. Our newest fund is called 'Q is greater than 10.' It's really funny when we go out to raise these things how people roll their eyes. It's not like we have any shortage of capital. So if you don't believe, don't believe, no pressure. But already...

Already that same facility has announced that they have a Q value greater than four. Our companies, some of them aren't yet publishing Q values, but they're private companies with the flexibility to move faster, use next generation technology. If the public labs are stating Q greater than four, I'll let you draw your own conclusions. These are companies like Commonwealth Fusion, one of the pioneers of the space based up in Boston, Massachusetts. There are tokamak approaches, stellarator approaches, inertial confinement. We have some really crazy stuff I don't think anyone's really talked about yet. We have a company working on fusion reactors that look like a server, literally like a 2U server unit. Some of these are tabletop and some look more like a small industrial facility. It depends on the application, whether they're pushing electrons to the grid, or at a forward operating military base, or in an airplane, or fueling AI training runs.

There's no doubt that AI is the biggest impact to the demand curve in energy globally. 20 plus years ago, I was one of the core people building the data centers at Google. From 2003 to 2007, we were the largest power consumer in three states in the United States and in two countries outside the United States. Building and powering servers is an exercise in consumption. Compute requires electrons. That's the nature of a silicon chip. But even if we carve that out, with a burgeoning middle class, a planet getting increasingly hotter, and the growth of air conditioning, you're going to need more electrons generally. We would like to hope we move away from hydrocarbons as the base of the economy and need more electrons. Even if you weren't working in AI, you were seeing an accelerating growth curve for electrons. Now AI is the customer for so much of this stuff, but it is also the scientist behind so much of this stuff. Fusion is a great example. One of the reasons fusion moved so slowly is that considering the temperatures, magnets, superconducting tape, and lasers necessary to experiment, a lot of those fusion companies could only attempt one experiment per year or longer. Now with AI and machine learning, they can conduct literally thousands of experiments per week in the computer in high fidelity, including the insane stuff that would never make it through the risk committee.

Fusion is so much safer than fishing that it's regulated like an MRI machine. There isn't the waste component, there isn't the meltdown, evacuate the neighborhood component. But as you're experimenting with fusion, you're perfectly capable of melting everything in the room at those temperatures. Some of those early experiments would have never been attempted because of the impact they could have had in the facility. If you don't try the craziest stuff, you're never going to unlock the real breakthroughs. This is across the entire portfolio, the impact of AI. We see it everywhere, whether in making industrial chemicals with enzymes instead of oil, storing energy and the calculations around battery charging and efficiency and discharge, or even discovering new enzymes and proteins that help displace natural gas and ammonia-based fertilizer with microbial-based fertilizer.