Elon Will Handle the Energy Bottleneck Himself: Buys APR Energy for $1B

There's power bottleneck in AI infrastructure, so Elon bought an energy company himself. From APR Energy, behind-the-meter generation, and nuclear, everyone is trying to secure electricity for data centers. 

We also cover rising DRAM, HBM, and NAND prices, and wonder if energy may be the next major AI infrastructure trade.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 AI Power Bottleneck
2:44 Energy Demand Explodes
4:12 Elon’s Permitting Loophole
7:23 Memory Trade Rotation
10:08 Korea’s Memory Shock
12:27 Electricity Becomes the Trade
14:51 Power Stack Layers
16:15 Bloom’s Portable Fix
17:35 GE Vernova Leads
19:29 Nuclear Gets Interesting
21:44 The Power Trade Thesis
22:44 Bullish on Electricity
24:09 Model Agnostic Demand
25:15 Short-Term and Space Power
26:00 Closing

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Josh works with Anthropic as a contractor. All views expressed are his own and do not represent Anthropic, its leadership, or its affiliates. Nothing in this episode is investment advice.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Ejaaz:
Elon Musk just spent over a billion dollars of his own money to buy a company

Ejaaz:
that no one's ever heard of.

Ejaaz:
It's called APR. And the strangest thing about this company is it doesn't make

Ejaaz:
AI chips, it doesn't make rockets, it doesn't make any sort of AI model.

Ejaaz:
It makes gas turbines that sit on a trailer, get wheeled into your data center

Ejaaz:
campus, and powers it on all your GPUs in a matter of days.

Ejaaz:
Now, this is coming from the guy that spent two decades philosophizing about

Ejaaz:
solar energy. But when you unpack why he made this purchase,

Ejaaz:
it reveals a new trade in the AI space, which explains why memory stocks are crashing currently.

Ejaaz:
Energy is explicitly abundant in the US, but bringing that energy online to

Ejaaz:
power the billions of dollars worth of GPUs that are going online this year

Ejaaz:
is an incredibly hard feat. And

Ejaaz:
there's a small category of companies that are helping do this in 2026.

Josh:
Yeah, there's a company called APR Energy, which is the name of the company

Josh:
which he purchased. And it has a pretty funny backstory.

Josh:
It was founded in Jacksonville in 2004, then listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2011.

Josh:
And in 2013, it bought GE's energy rental business to become the largest mobile

Josh:
gas turbine leaser in the world.

Josh:
And then ever since then, it's been passed around and taken private to private equity.

Josh:
And due to some investigative work and searching through

Josh:
Elon Musk bought it for about a billion dollars. So what did he get for a billion

Josh:
dollars? The answer is about a gigawatt of power.

Josh:
For reference, a gigawatt of power powers roughly 750,000 homes,

Josh:
and it's also the output for one size nuclear reactor.

Josh:
This gigawatt is also enough power for about 600,000 H100 class GPUs,

Josh:
which is, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the largest coherent cluster.

Josh:
So if he's actually able to get another gigawatt, that's amazing.

Josh:
But the question that left me is why is this owned by elon and not spacex ai

Josh:
or tesla it's like why of all the categories is he choosing this one why this

Josh:
particular company and why on his personal balance sheet

Ejaaz:
Yeah so i i have a few theories as to

Ejaaz:
why he might want to do this um one

Ejaaz:
obvious one is he might want this to apply to a bunch of different companies

Ejaaz:
the other main one being tesla and Tesla, for what it's worth,

Ejaaz:
is meant to be an exclusive company separate to SpaceX AI, although there are

Ejaaz:
rumors that they might eventually merge at some point in the future.

Ejaaz:
So I think this is more of like a tax slash structural reason why he purchased

Ejaaz:
the company on his own dime.

Ejaaz:
In fact, the only reason why we learned about this purchase is because one of

Ejaaz:
the companies that was invested in APR had to disclose personal returns of $50 million.

Ejaaz:
That's the only reason why we were able to realize that Elon made this purchase. Now.

Ejaaz:
If we zoom out for a second, we've heard that energy and power is the next bottleneck

Ejaaz:
for AI. But I think a lot of people don't actually understand why and what the

Ejaaz:
problem is. So I just want to touch on that very briefly.

Ejaaz:
Now, if we rewind about three years, 2023, the demand for data center energy

Ejaaz:
was roughly at around 23 gigawatts, which at the time was gargantuan.

Ejaaz:
We did not have near that amount available to bring online.

Ejaaz:
Fast forward to 2026, that has more than doubled to 46.5 gigawatts, I believe, in total.

Ejaaz:
Now, the issue is, in this year alone, we are only planning to bring online

Ejaaz:
12 gigawatts. That's significantly less than that 46 target, right?

Ejaaz:
But it gets even worse. We are currently on track, and we're near over half the year now.

Ejaaz:
On track to bring online five gigawatts of that 12 gigawatts commitment.

Ejaaz:
So the point I'm trying to make is there is a significant bottleneck and it's

Ejaaz:
very, very slow to bring energy online. Now, if you might ask,

Ejaaz:
well, don't we have an abundance of energy in the West and America in general?

Ejaaz:
The answer is, yeah, we do.

Ejaaz:
But it's incredibly hard to bring this energy online.

Ejaaz:
We need access to high voltage transformers. We need access to grid infrastructure.

Ejaaz:
We need all the permitting and regulations around this, all of this slows everything

Ejaaz:
down to the tune of five to seven years. I'm not exaggerating.

Ejaaz:
We're talking about like almost over half a decade to do any of this.

Ejaaz:
Now, what Elon's purchase shows us is he's kind of going into the gray area.

Ejaaz:
Now, there's this thing called the Clean Air Act.

Ejaaz:
And it's basically this act which states you can't bring gas turbines onto your

Ejaaz:
data center in order to power up your GPUs. That's kind of like not illegal,

Ejaaz:
but it's allegedly kind of like not malpractice.

Ejaaz:
Now, the fact that he's purchased this company allows him to bring permitted

Ejaaz:
gas turbines onto his data center ground under that clean air act.

Ejaaz:
So it doesn't trigger any kind of like warnings or anything like that,

Ejaaz:
which allows him to power up his GPUs.

Ejaaz:
So Elon's being very smart. He's trying to be the fastest scaler for bringing

Ejaaz:
GPUs online so he can build the best model. That's what Meta's trying to do.

Ejaaz:
And that's what he's trying to do with Grok 4.5 and subsequent models.

Josh:
Yeah, it's a race to power these GPUs. And like you mentioned,

Josh:
the infrastructure is the problem here when it comes to creating power.

Josh:
It is less the actual power. We have all of the resources, we have the oil,

Josh:
we have the natural gas, we just have a very difficult time plugging it into

Josh:
the infrastructure that we need to turn these things on.

Josh:
And if you look at the country like veins, all the power lines that run through,

Josh:
the grid is really strained, and it's in a really difficult place.

Josh:
And I remember having this conversation a decade ago when I was first getting

Josh:
excited about electric cars and teslas and the impact that just charging all

Josh:
of those cars would have on the grid and how difficult it would be to sustain

Josh:
and at that time we were barely keeping up

Josh:
now we are still barely keeping up so to put on cities worth of energy online

Josh:
into these existing grid structures it causes a lot of trouble and a lot of

Josh:
problems which leads us to the one way to actually do that which is more of

Josh:
a modular solution instead of tapping into the grid you have to bring your own

Josh:
power, bring your own electrons.

Josh:
And there's three key categories to doing that. The first is solar,

Josh:
Solar has the largest footprint in terms of these options. Solar generally works

Josh:
by just absorbing a lot of sun, store it in batteries, feed the batteries into the data center.

Josh:
This is good, but it doesn't allow you to get as much as quickly as densely.

Josh:
And the permitting, as we know, is a really difficult thing.

Josh:
The second option is nuclear. Nuclear is a kind of far cry from being readily

Josh:
available for data centers today, which brings us to the third,

Josh:
which is just bring your own turbine

Josh:
bring these turbines tap into a net gas line and they're on their way because

Josh:
these turbines can just generate electricity on site and in a way these data

Josh:
centers are starting to build their own electrical grids

Josh:
and then perhaps they can reverse their way into feeding the existing grid but

Josh:
for now they just need to get energy to the data centers and the best way of doing that is just

Josh:
bring your own bring your own power grid and that's kind of the basis of this

Josh:
investment here with elon is like he's now able to

Josh:
buy a company that owns these turbines and he's going to bring them over to

Josh:
the data center and power these chips on faster than everyone else.

Josh:
This is what it's come down to. You have to actually acquire private companies

Josh:
and roll out your own infrastructure if you want to build this.

Ejaaz:
Isn't that insane that we are in a position where in order to get access to

Ejaaz:
like a basic commodity, electricity, to power the thing that's going to make your country, your GDP,

Ejaaz:
increase significantly, you have to go through all this archaic permitting laws and stuff.

Ejaaz:
New York State just banned a bunch of data centers. So that's going to delay

Ejaaz:
data centers in New York by like five years.

Ejaaz:
It's just crazy that we have to go through all this red tape.

Ejaaz:
But nevertheless, this is a workaround.

Ejaaz:
And if gas turbines on a trailer sounds familiar, you are probably thinking

Ejaaz:
of other companies like Bloom Energy and publicly traded stocks and companies

Ejaaz:
that might be fixing or solving this bottleneck. We'll get to that.

Ejaaz:
Eventually later on in this episode. But before we do that, we have to talk

Ejaaz:
about the movement of funds and capital within the AI trade.

Ejaaz:
Because for a lot of time on this show, Josh, we have spoken about a little

Ejaaz:
component called memory.

Ejaaz:
And memory feeds into a ton of things, most significantly, the GPUs that power

Ejaaz:
the training and inference of all these different AI models.

Ejaaz:
And one common trend that's happened with these memory pieces is the prices

Ejaaz:
of these things have skyrocketed to the tune, I think it's on average three

Ejaaz:
to 500% over the last nine months. So it is absolutely insane.

Ejaaz:
The types of demand that we're seeing for memory, high bandwidth memory is the

Ejaaz:
most obvious one, but also NAND flash, the stuff that's created by SanDisk and stuff like that.

Ejaaz:
And these stocks have taken a little bit of a battering recently.

Josh:
Yeah, memory stocks have been absolutely crushed. It's been a really difficult

Josh:
time to invest in them if you've only owned them for two weeks.

Josh:
If you've owned them for any longer, congratulations, you're still doing incredible.

Josh:
But there has been this whiplash, right? That's kind of happened in memory stocks

Josh:
where they went up seemingly 20% every single day for months on end.

Josh:
And now they've started to back off collectively about 20% off of the highs.

Josh:
And this is interesting because when you compare the actual price of memory

Josh:
stocks to the price of memory, the price of memory is continuing its up only

Josh:
trend. In fact, just this month, it looks like the price, the average price of DRAM

Josh:
is up almost 20% on the month, which is crazy. Yes, this is the chart that I was looking at.

Josh:
When you look at the month of July, the cost of DRAM is up 20% and the stocks

Josh:
are down 20%, even though the demand has not changed one bit.

Josh:
So that's why it seems like the market is a little spooked and rightfully so.

Josh:
I mean, these stocks just ran up a tremendous amount. When you look at the actual

Josh:
core cost of goods sold relative to the margin that they're able to charge for

Josh:
these things, it's still continuing to go up only and that demand curve hasn't slowed.

Josh:
And this is the interesting thing here is like memory stocks are getting crushed

Josh:
memory prices are still going up but it seems like people are just kind of tired

Josh:
of that narrative and the money is just starting to flow into other more exciting

Josh:
places because i mean perhaps everyone's just made enough on the memory trade for now

Ejaaz:
I i think the markets are incredibly emotional and if we use memory as an example

Ejaaz:
to your point demand hasn't wavered it's just gone exponentially up the prices

Ejaaz:
of these things uh going up prove it but also the

Ejaaz:
ltas the long-term agreements which is basically the contracts that these memory

Ejaaz:
suppliers are signing with clients.

Ejaaz:
There was this crazy stat for SK Hynix, which is, I think, the number one or

Ejaaz:
number two memory supplier in the world. There's only three of them.

Ejaaz:
Between 13 to 15 customers secured around 40% of their projected profit for next year.

Ejaaz:
So they've already sold out their supply for the entirety of 2027.

Ejaaz:
And 40% of that, 40% of that profit has already been committed to.

Ejaaz:
So they have to pay regardless of what happens with memory supply next year, 13 to 15 people.

Ejaaz:
So the point I'm making is the demand is overwhelming at this point and nothing

Ejaaz:
has actually changed. If you look at Micron, let's pull up their chart over here.

Ejaaz:
Over the last month, they're down around 24%. But when I look at their forwards

Ejaaz:
earnings, their 7x forwards earnings on 350% revenue and 85%, 85% gross margins.

Ejaaz:
There is very little businesses, especially in the hardware realm,

Ejaaz:
that makes that type of margin.

Ejaaz:
And the point is like, you can call a memory bubble as soon as there's oversupply

Ejaaz:
for this type of commodity.

Ejaaz:
But the truth is the fabricators, the plants, the factories that are creating

Ejaaz:
these things aren't in overabundance just yet. And that bottleneck isn't going

Ejaaz:
to get unlocked until around 2030. But we see people getting frustrated.

Ejaaz:
So I think this is just temporary.

Ejaaz:
And if you want to look for a reason, a thing to blame, look no further than...

Ejaaz:
Our friends over in South Korea. Now, a reminder for everyone,

Ejaaz:
the two biggest memory suppliers are based in Korea.

Ejaaz:
It is SK Hynix and Samsung. And there was a lot of red on the chart,

Ejaaz:
as I'm showing you on my screen here, over the last two weeks,

Ejaaz:
because a lot of investors in Korea were over leveraged to the tune of about a billion dollars.

Ejaaz:
And so the market has shed the equivalent value over the last week to the tune

Ejaaz:
of $1.5 trillion. Now, of course, that is an order of magnitude larger.

Ejaaz:
I was being a little kind of tongue in cheek there. But the point is,

Ejaaz:
the market is overreactive.

Ejaaz:
And I think this is just oversold. The fundamentals still sit and memory is

Ejaaz:
still an important trade, but people are looking for other things.

Ejaaz:
And maybe that's power and electricity for now.

Josh:
Yeah, I think that's probably the rotation that's happening is people are like,

Josh:
I'm done playing with this toy for now. And the fundamentals are still very

Josh:
strong, but I mean, everyone's just gotten a huge win and are probably just

Josh:
looking for something else.

Josh:
Our guess, and the reason we're recording this episode is because it seems as if that is going to be

Josh:
energy it is going to be powering these things on so like everyone's like okay

Josh:
well we understand memory now we understand the complex sk heinix just went

Josh:
public perhaps that marked like

Josh:
the end of people's enthusiasm towards it where does the money rotate out to

Josh:
well probably this electricity trade and we've mentioned this a few times in

Josh:
the past but the electricity trade at least for me personally is the most exciting

Josh:
of all of the trades because it's something that is so

Josh:
durable and so necessary in any advancement of any society ever so even in the

Josh:
case all the data centers turned off tomorrow there's still this unbelievable

Josh:
demand for electricity in everything that we do

Josh:
and that's why the electricity trade is this really exciting thing that i'm

Josh:
kind of happy to see dollars

Ejaaz:
Moving over to.

Josh:
Um because i mean yeah if we look at these charts that we have here the u.s

Josh:
data center power demand is basically doubling

Josh:
over the next 24 over the course of 24 months from 31 gigawatts to 66 gigawatts in 24 months

Josh:
that's crazy and then what it does to the old grid is the total u.s electricity

Josh:
demand it used to be one percent it is now climbing to three percent that number

Josh:
is going to continue to be up only so there's a

Josh:
increasing demand of these data centers it's not going anywhere in fact it's

Josh:
going straight vertical and an incapability of us to deliver

Josh:
on that demand with these existing infrastructure and you just you mentioned

Josh:
it's like crazy that we have to have all these permits and everything,

Josh:
but at least we have this system in place that allows people like Elon to come

Josh:
and buy these turbines and like solve the problem.

Josh:
So what's really cool now is this opens up this entire new world where,

Josh:
all right, the grid is kind of cooked, but we need electricity.

Ejaaz:
Yes.

Josh:
Who are the people who are most creatively solving this problem to get these

Josh:
data centers online as fast as possible?

Josh:
And that's where the money is going to be flowing. It's like,

Josh:
if you can create an electron of energy for cheaper than someone else,

Josh:
you could drop it the data center that's basically an infinite money glitch

Josh:
whoever can figure that out will get paid as much money as these large cap companies

Josh:
are able to fund because that is the single bottleneck that

Josh:
no one's seemingly been able to solve i mean we look at the gas turbines how

Josh:
long does it take just to get a blade from a turbine they're backed up for years

Josh:
with purchase orders so it's this really difficult challenge and that's where the focus is now

Josh:
Who's solving that challenge?

Ejaaz:
So who is solving that challenge? Maybe we should answer that question and get

Ejaaz:
into kind of like the companies that are both private and publicly traded that

Ejaaz:
might be solving the problem that we've just spent the last kind of 10 minutes explaining.

Ejaaz:
So now we've talked about the AI infra stack. There are many different layers

Ejaaz:
that previous episodes you should definitely tune in and check those out.

Ejaaz:
But within the power stack specifically, there are its own layers.

Ejaaz:
Now you mentioned earlier, Josh, that there are modular ways to approach it,

Ejaaz:
different types of companies, nuclear, you've got kind of like solar, those kinds of things.

Ejaaz:
There's also different quick fix ways to solve the power constraint.

Ejaaz:
And I'm going to run through a few, starting with layer one,

Ejaaz:
which I call the quick fix. That's what Elon just did.

Ejaaz:
He purchased a literal company for a billion dollars that creates these gas

Ejaaz:
turbines, places them on a trailer, like a trailer truck trailer,

Ejaaz:
and wheels them in to your data center.

Ejaaz:
A literal trailer, 18 million. A literal trailer, I'm not exaggerating here, right?

Ejaaz:
And they park it behind the data center. There's actually a term for this.

Ejaaz:
I was watching the All In podcast and they explained it very well.

Ejaaz:
It's called behind the meter. So this is kind of like a gray area where you

Ejaaz:
can kind of park it behind the official meter and power up that meter.

Ejaaz:
And technically it's legal. It's all good to do. And it's a fast way to power

Ejaaz:
on your GPUs, but there's a few issues with it.

Ejaaz:
Number one, you can't power up that many GPUs. He's got one gigawatt and his

Ejaaz:
data centers on average are gonna be scaled up to three gigawatts.

Ejaaz:
So there's still kind of like a fix. thing there, you can get it online in a

Ejaaz:
couple of days, which is great, but it only lasts for maybe like a six to 12

Ejaaz:
months. So it's not like a long-term solution.

Ejaaz:
Now, the layer below that, we start seeing names that are very popular,

Ejaaz:
at least in this ecosphere, which is called Bloom Energy. Now,

Ejaaz:
Bloom Energy has this thing called a fuel oxide cell. It's kind of like this

Ejaaz:
massive gigantic box that, again, is portable.

Ejaaz:
You bring it onto your site, similar to the gas turbines on a trailer,

Ejaaz:
but it converts natural gas into energy way more efficiently,

Ejaaz:
and it can last around four to seven years. Now, the reason why people are so

Ejaaz:
hyped up about Bloom Energy is because.

Ejaaz:
Typically, if you have to wait five to seven years to even get access to the

Ejaaz:
transformer, if you can get access to this early on, and it's kind of like a

Ejaaz:
medium term fix, four to seven years, you can scale your data centers way quicker

Ejaaz:
and maybe even train a frontier model way sooner than your competitors.

Ejaaz:
So that's what the likes of Meta and a bunch of data centers in Mexico are doing.

Ejaaz:
But there is an issue with this. And I want to find the specific tweet here.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, over here, Bloom Energy shares are trading lower after New Mexico regulators

Ejaaz:
rejected for the second time permits for a gas pipeline.

Ejaaz:
So the point that we were making earlier on this in the show is you can bring

Ejaaz:
these amazing fuel oxide cells, but it runs into the red tape issue,

Ejaaz:
which is we can't get access to permitting to be able to run these things.

Ejaaz:
So you end up facing the delay on its own. That's why Elon purchased his company

Ejaaz:
APR for a billion dollars.

Josh:
And GE for Nova has kind of positioned himself at the center of this trade.

Josh:
They produce the turbines and the grid equipment and the just stock has just

Josh:
continued to go up and up and up uh 300 in three years and it seems like they're

Josh:
taking orders all the way through 2031 so the revenue is very predictable in

Josh:
2025 their orders doubled year over year to 7.1 billion dollars and it's just this like

Josh:
unbelievable company where again similar to bloom energy if you can build the

Josh:
electrons they will come and as soon as you hit a wall there's someone else

Josh:
who who has the permitting who hasn't hit the wall and it looks like this company

Josh:
in particular is one that hasn't and And it's been this really nice, slow and steady growth.

Josh:
You haven't seen the crazy exponentials like an ETF like DRAM has.

Josh:
It's just slow, steady, really strong growth when it comes to building turbines,

Josh:
generating electricity, and getting the permitting required to actually put these things online.

Ejaaz:
I like to think of GE Vinova as the old staple of the power industry.

Ejaaz:
They've been around for a while, so they know how to deal with the old school

Ejaaz:
transformers, the high voltage types of things that you need to kind of equipment that you need to build.

Ejaaz:
Pioneer, they have all those supply chain relationships, but they also understand

Ejaaz:
the quick fix solutions that we mentioned earlier from the Bloom Energies,

Ejaaz:
from the APRs, and they also spin up and create gas turbines.

Ejaaz:
So if you look at the company and the clientele that they've signed,

Ejaaz:
We're talking about $7 billion deals with Microsoft.

Ejaaz:
We've got OpenAI being one of their primary customers. They're all in the process

Ejaaz:
of powering up a bunch of these companies' data centers. So the point is,

Ejaaz:
GE Vinova is kind of like the TSMC of power, dare I say.

Ejaaz:
And they've kind of been around, they've kind of proven their method,

Ejaaz:
and they're seeing consistent demand.

Ejaaz:
I think they're growing on average around 30% year over year.

Ejaaz:
But if I had to take a bet for this particular company, again,

Ejaaz:
not investment advice, I would say that growth goes exponential.

Ejaaz:
Over the next six to 12 months when people realize that you need power and energy

Ejaaz:
to bring these things online.

Ejaaz:
Now, the final rung of our stack that I'm showing you over here,

Ejaaz:
it says layer four, it talks about utilities and IPPs, but one thing that isn't

Ejaaz:
mentioned right now is the nuclear side of things.

Ejaaz:
And there is a company that we've interviewed the founder of.

Ejaaz:
And they're building kind of like the modular approach to nuclear.

Ejaaz:
Now, typically, if you look at any nuclear company, you're not seeing any of

Ejaaz:
these really come online until 2031 to 2035.

Ejaaz:
But Valor is an example of a company that is going to speed this up pretty significantly.

Josh:
Yeah. Also, just to clarify, an IPP, it's an independent power producer,

Josh:
which is a company that owns plants and sells electricity into the market rather

Josh:
than serving a regulated territory.

Josh:
And this is a really important distinction because

Josh:
Like we mentioned, selling back into a market is far better than having to deal

Josh:
with red tape. So you figure out the red tape on your own, you produce the power,

Josh:
and then you sell it back. And that seems to be the best way that these companies

Josh:
are kind of working this out.

Josh:
And in fact, larger companies have been working with these IPPs to lock in 10

Josh:
to 20 years of electricity at fixed terms.

Josh:
So Microsoft, for example, they have Three Mile Island, which I mean,

Josh:
for those who aren't familiar is a very old previously shut down nuclear reactor

Josh:
they brought it back online and their deal length is 20 years and they get 100 of the output so

Josh:
the time horizons on these are huge and it shows the

Josh:
the real scale of what this kind of power trend is going to look like over time

Josh:
where there's obviously no shortage of energy demand people are locking it up

Josh:
for decades at a time as if there was very long-term bonds because electricity really is

Josh:
a form of currency now it's like if you if you can get the electrons you could

Josh:
power on the intelligence you could serve the tokens you can make money and in a way

Josh:
earning 20 years of electricity getting that lockdown is is more powerful than

Josh:
issuing like a 20-year bond who can give you three percent because you can create

Josh:
a lot more upside with that energy so this is an important trend that i think

Josh:
we're going to be following as well it's just seeing

Josh:
What companies are able to lock up guaranteed energy for a really long time

Josh:
and the nuclear opportunity like you mentioned is so cool it's just a little early.

Josh:
No one's quite got them online yet. No one has figured out the permitting.

Josh:
It's not there, but man, when that comes online, that's gonna be huge.

Ejaaz:
You know, as we talk about kind of like the...

Ejaaz:
The structure of these energy and power companies and the deals that they're

Ejaaz:
starting to sign, but it hasn't been really abundantly signed just yet.

Ejaaz:
It's not really guaranteed growth rate.

Ejaaz:
It's a little bit murky. People aren't really sure if this is going to be the

Ejaaz:
next trade. You know what it reminds me of?

Ejaaz:
It reminds me of the memory trade before it became the memory trade.

Ejaaz:
Before they started signing massive long-term agreements and price hikes of 300% to 500%.

Ejaaz:
It sounds exactly the same. You know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Ejaaz:
And I'm sensing this for the power trade as well. People don't really know about GE Vinova.

Ejaaz:
Maybe people in the comments are gonna say like, hey, like, you know,

Ejaaz:
I'm an old schooler here and I have heard of it, but like most people don't,

Ejaaz:
and they don't understand the importance.

Ejaaz:
It's a very different type of problem. Like with memory, it's easy.

Ejaaz:
It's like kind of like memory, okay, you need to remember context about everyone.

Ejaaz:
I want the AI to remember me, cool.

Ejaaz:
But power, it's kind of just like, yeah, can't you just get the electricity?

Ejaaz:
Don't we have like an abundance of electricity? And it's a much more nuanced problem.

Ejaaz:
And I think people are now only starting to unpack what that investment sector

Ejaaz:
might actually look like. So brings us to the question,

Ejaaz:
bull and bear case josh um i think you should go first what is your are you

Ejaaz:
bullish or bearish about this uh this power trade over the next let's say six

Ejaaz:
to 12 months and then like three to five.

Josh:
Years yeah i'm bullish on the power trade till the end of time i think like at the limit

Josh:
electrons are more valuable than dollars and i think this continues to be true

Josh:
for basically infinity there has been a singular trend throughout all of history

Josh:
where more energy equals more productivity, equals more innovation,

Josh:
equals more prosperity.

Josh:
And the more electrons you could throw at a problem, the better the success outcomes become.

Josh:
And this seems like a one-word trade forever. In terms of these swing trading

Josh:
things that are happening, I don't know. I mean, memory was the first trade

Josh:
of the first half of 2026.

Josh:
And it's ironic that kind of peaked the same week that SK Hanex listed on the

Josh:
NASDAQ. And now the question is, like, what is the next scarce input everyone's running to?

Josh:
Elon kind of answered it with his billion dollar acquisition.

Josh:
He said, hey, it is electricity, it is electrons, go do this.

Josh:
So in terms of short term, seems good. In terms of long term, seems amazing.

Josh:
Medium term, who knows, but I think the demand for electricity is up only forever.

Ejaaz:
Okay, that's pretty bullish. I'm afraid to say that I'm also equally as bullish.

Ejaaz:
I'll give you a few different reasons as to why.

Ejaaz:
Number one, I love that this layer of the AI infra stack is completely agnostic

Ejaaz:
to whatever your model is, whoever created the model, and most importantly,

Ejaaz:
which country created the model.

Ejaaz:
A big topic of debate over the last week is China versus the USA.

Ejaaz:
Hey, China just released an amazing open source model, the largest ever,

Ejaaz:
2.8 trillion parameters, Kimi K3.

Ejaaz:
And it's now the case that over 56% of tokens, at least on OpenRouter,

Ejaaz:
which is an open American platform, is being spent on Chinese open source models.

Ejaaz:
So the big question is, should we allow people to use these open source models?

Ejaaz:
And does it matter that they're not using an American-based model?

Ejaaz:
Well, you know who isn't worried?

Ejaaz:
Jensen Huang, who creates GPUs that power all these different types of models.

Ejaaz:
And you know who doesn't care below Jensen Huang?

Ejaaz:
It's all the people that are helping power and energize all these GPUs.

Ejaaz:
It's going to be the same case. It doesn't matter if your model is open,

Ejaaz:
whether it's cheap, whether it's expensive, whether it's Frontier, whether it's not.

Ejaaz:
The point is you're going to need energy and you're going to need GPUs to do

Ejaaz:
this. It's a commodity that is going to be required regardless of the situation

Ejaaz:
or geopolitical situation as is.

Ejaaz:
Now, when we talk about energy in general, we can't talk about Elon purchasing

Ejaaz:
APR and also Elon launching data centers into space to literally harness the energy of the sun.

Ejaaz:
He's been the biggest proponent of energy harnessing for a while now,

Ejaaz:
and he's taking two different approaches on the ground.

Ejaaz:
He's purchasing companies like APR for short-term fixes, but he's also,

Ejaaz:
in his long-term plan, aiming to.

Ejaaz:
Harness one of the largest energy sources in our galaxy.

Ejaaz:
And so if that doesn't show you how bullish people are on the future demand

Ejaaz:
of energy, I don't know what will.

Ejaaz:
So I think this is just going to be a growing trend that people are going to

Ejaaz:
become more amicable to like they did with the memory trade over the next couple

Ejaaz:
of years. And you just need to sit tight.

Josh:
And that is the episode on the state of energy, the state of power,

Josh:
the state of electricity, where the possible next trade is going

Josh:
again as always not financial advice i don't even own any of this stuff here

Josh:
although i probably should

Josh:
but it's just interesting it's exciting to talk about and it feels directionally

Josh:
correct at least so now you have an understanding of loosely how things work

Josh:
why it is so important and why a lot of people are equally as excited

Josh:
about this opportunity if you enjoyed this episode please do not forget to share

Josh:
with a friend with a family member who might also enjoy maybe electricity maybe

Josh:
one of the other episodes that we've recorded this week

Josh:
if you liked it please don't forget to rate us five stars on your favorite podcast

Josh:
platform where you get your podcasts.

Josh:
And yeah, is that everything? Anything else you just before we let

Ejaaz:
People go here? The final call is Limitless has gone independent.

Ejaaz:
We are keeping the lights on at home and we would love to look for a partner.

Ejaaz:
So if you are someone that has a product or service, or if you know of someone

Ejaaz:
that has a product or service that would be amazing to share with our Limitless

Ejaaz:
audience, please reach out.

Ejaaz:
Email us in the description below or reach out to us on X. But that should be

Ejaaz:
it. And we will see you folks on the next one.

Josh:
See you next time.