The bottleneck holding back AI is a scarcity of power, or so goes the story. That may be true — and plenty of reporting backs it up — but different actors in the space face varying incentives to play up or play down that narrative.
So what incentives are at play, and how do they shape each player’s story?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Shanu Mathew, senior vice president and portfolio manager-analyst for U.S. sustainable equity at Lazard. Last month on X, he posted a breakdown of the actors — including hyperscalers, chip makers, utilities, and others — and how the different incentives they face shape how they talk about energy and AI. They cover topics like:
- Hyperscalers’ mixed incentives: the benefits of building their own capacity vs encouraging others to overbuild
- Why equipment makers, chipmakers, and land developers benefit from talking up the bottleneck to boost demand for their services
- How independent power producers and gas players benefit from high prices
- How the power-bottleneck narrative has shifted over time
Resources
- Latitude Media: ERCOT’s large load queue has nearly quadrupled in a single year
- Latitude Media: The power bottleneck is changing data center financing
- Latitude Media: Early-stage data centers are driving up US power demand forecasts
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. AI data centers can’t wait years for grid power—and with Bloom Energy’s fuel cells, they don’t have to. Bloom Energy delivers affordable, always-on, ultra-reliable onsite power, built for chipmakers, hyperscalers, and data center leaders looking to power their operations at AI speed. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.
Catalyst is supported by Third Way. Third Way’s new PACE study surveyed over 200 clean energy professionals to pinpoint the non-cost barriers delaying clean energy deployment today and offers practical solutions to help get projects over the finish line. Read Third Way’s full report, and learn more about their PACE initiative, at www.thirdway.org/pace.
Transcript
Stephen Lacey: A very brief word before we start the show. We’ve got a survey for listeners of Catalyst and Open Circuit, and we would be so grateful if you could take a few moments to fill it out. As our audience continues to expand, it’s an opportunity to understand how and why you listen to our shows, and it helps us continue bringing relevant content on the tech and markets you care about in clean energy. If you fill it out, you’ll get a chance to win a $100 gift card from Amazon and you can find it@latitudemedia.com slash survey. Or just click the survey link in the show notes. Thank you so much.
Tag: Latitude Media: covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann and this is Catalyst.
Shanu Mathew: Who has incentives to talk up the power constraints and who may not have incentives to do that and maybe take the opposite view where it’s actually not as big of a deal, and where might economic incentives actually inform or influence views more than is appreciated by the market
Shayle Kann: Coming up: Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the behavior.
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann. I lead the early stage venture strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. All right, so this episode is a reminder to always monitor incentives. More specifically, we’re talking about the narrative and certainly the reality today around power scarcity as the rate limiter on the growth of AI. Everyone is talking about it actually saw a chart recently that showed the frequency of mentions of the word power or energy on S&P 500 earnings calls over time. And you can imagine the shape of this chart, it had been pretty steady, actually trending slightly downward over time until 2025 when the line literally went vertical. There’s basically no question in my mind that power is actually a bottleneck for data center growth today and perhaps therefore for AI growth. That’s sort of a truism, but it could also become a comfortable scapegoat depending on where things trend in AI world.
And because it’s convenient and because it’s widely discussed, it’s important to think one level below the surface about what you hear from various players in the market. That’s why I really love this recent post on X initially from Shau Mathew that we’re discussing today. Shanu’s been on this pod before to talk about public market stuff because he’s a senior vice president and portfolio manager for US sustainable equity at Lazard, but he recently went online and went meticulously through basically every player in the AI slash energy world and laid out their incentives should they drum up concern about power shortages? Should they downplay them, should they capitalize on them? This conversation for me is foundational and should act sort of as a reference and a reminder for me anyway, anytime I hear something new about energy and AI from one of the major players in the market. So let’s go through it. Here’s Shanu.
Shanu, welcome back.
Shanu Mathew: Hey Shayle, thanks for having me on again.
Shayle Kann: Alright, so what got you started thinking about the incentives evolved, the different actors involved in Data Center Power Nexus? What sparked the thinking?
Shanu Mathew: It’s a good question. I feel like everyone has been thinking about this for the last two years, or at least hopefully, so I don’t feel as lonely, but I think the premise for this tweet or thought that I had was that there’s general understanding that there’s a few ground truths and ones AI is a foundational technology that’s going to persist in society. Two is we need a lot more energy infrastructure. The magnitude and duration of the cycle is of the debate, but it introduces a duration mismatch where technology is often done on cycles that are one to two years, whereas energy is typically multi-year or even multi-decadal depending on the type of asset. And what I was trying to gear in is psychologically humans organizations have incentives and incentives drive behaviors as everyone knows. And how could we take that lens and apply it to the power debate?
Because so many times I have folks coming to me from earnings calls or from events or conferences and saying, I heard this from X party or this from Y party, and that’s completely at odds with what they heard from another player down the stack. And so what we were trying to do is a clean sheet exercise was looking up and down the supply stack for AI, who has incentives to talk up the power constraints and who may not have incentives to do that and maybe take the opposite view where it’s actually not as big of a deal and are there economic incentives that may inform or influence their behaviors. The goal wasn’t to call out companies being misleading or anything like that. It’s just namely to acknowledge where might economic incentives actually inform or influencer their views more than is appreciated by the market.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I read the original post and it was like in some ways it’s kind of obvious, but at the same time it was sort of like a lightning bolt to me. I was like, oh yeah, I hear this stuff constantly as well. From every corner everybody is talking about the power bottleneck and it is important to examine the incentives that drive anybody’s behavior or the narrative that anybody’s telling about it, not because there isn’t a power bottleneck. I think you and I probably agree there is
For sure a hundred percent, but the magnitude, the duration, and certainly there probably won’t always be one. And so as this goes through whatever cycle it’s going to go through, we need to be paying attention to who is saying what and examining the incentives that drive that. So I thought it was super interesting and what I wanted to do with you is kind of talk through some of them, what we are hearing from these various parties and then the incentives that they have to say what they’re saying or maybe to say what they’re not saying. But let’s start by categorizing, walk me through at the high level there are a couple of groupings of actors that have similar incentives. So how do you think about the groupings?
Shanu Mathew: Yeah, at a high level I’ll try to, we can keep it simple, but again, there’s various degrees of nuance required. But at a high level, let’s start with the hyperscalers. Who are the folks that are driving a lot of this CapEx and investment cycle? These are, think of it as the cloud service providers, the Amazons, the Googles, the Microsofts of the world, as well as including meta, which is another hyperscaler even though they don’t have a legacy cloud business that drives investment spend on GPUs. And that’s kind of the equipment you have, the technology hardware if you will, that includes GPUs, CPUs, custom silicon offerings that moves upstream even into the supporting equipment, which includes electrical and cooling equipment. And then if you kind of go outside the data center, then you start to get into who supplies that power equipment as well as the overall actual power of the facility. And moving upstream there is who actually builds power, which is utilities as well as the labor and the EPCs and the engineering that goes into those types of facilities. So if you just go from who’s spending the capital and follow that down the stream, that’s a general way to think about some of these bigger pockets and so happy to jump into any of those.
Shayle Kann: Alright, so let’s start with the hyperscalers. They’re obviously at the epicenter of the data center buildout. How do you think about their incentive when they talk about power?
Shanu Mathew: Definitely, and I think this is the most interesting from a game theory standpoint. So just a backup for the audience that may not be entirely clear, right? The hyperscalers have really strong incumbent businesses oftentimes depending on who you’re talking about, cloud or digital advertising. And they think that the spend on AI allows them a better product opportunity in the future such as they can accelerate growth of cloud or advertising offerings or it’ll enhance their product offerings, which leads to better returns over time. And so you have two options to go out and get more capacity, right? One, they build their own capacity, but then two, they also can go out and procure capacity on the external market and that comes from neo clouds or colocators or things that we can get into. But if you think about it from their perspective, building your own capacity is typically what they prefer.
They have control and vertical integration when they have the chance to because they have teams internally, they have the expertise. But when you go back to that core issue is that I think everyone agrees that we need more energy. I think where the uncertainty comes in is how much energy do we need? And if you think about it from the perspective of them, if I have to go out and build all this infrastructure and this infrastructure is beyond the next few years, I need to potentially be comfortable underwriting it for the next 10 20. That energy is a natural mismatch where it’s like, okay, do I want to be the long-term risk taker of the assets that I’m underwriting? I might be comfortable doing that to an extent, but beyond that, do I perhaps let the market figure out the excess capacity? So if you’re a hyperscaler, the argument four would be if I really think that this is the greatest demand supercycle and I’m severely constrained, I might try to go out and build as much as possible and then procure all the extra.
The skeptic or the pessimistic view would be they see line of sight into the demand they need and that’s all they’re going to be comfortable building to. And the rest I’ll let the market sort out and such. So if you think about that from a power standpoint, my incentive in that scenario would be to talk up power constraints, right? Saying that there’s not nearly enough of it. We need to build so much this is the greatest sub cycle because that will incent speculators, developers, other companies like neo clouds and stuff that want to compete for leases from hyperscalers to go out and build infrastructure. And this one’s interesting because Satya Nadella for example, the CEO of Microsoft kind of told you this actually on a podcast earlier this year. I think it was late last year, he was on Dwarkesh and he talked about when he was asked why not commit more resources to building more assets? And he ultimately said, well, I’m seeing a lot of activity from developers and colocators and neo clouds and I think that I might be able to procure cheap supply in the future because who benefits if there is an overbuild or too much build and conditions loosen, that means cheap leases for them and that might be cheaper than actually going out and building your own CapEx. And so that’s the game theory in one way or the other. In terms of why build or why might I just wait to see how the chips may fall,
Shayle Kann: They’re complicated. I think you can see it going either way. On one hand, they clearly have an incentive to say that there is this massive bottleneck in the form of power and power infrastructure because that hopefully from their perspective incentivizes the world to build more of that stuff so that they can build more data centers. So they should be shouting from the rooftops. This is the bottleneck also by the way, it’s convenient that it may indeed be true, but it’s also convenient for them to be like the bottleneck is definitely power.
That means it’s definitely not demand for their services. And again, that may be true today, but they could say that even if it weren’t true and that would be helpful to them. So to me there’s a very clear incentive for them to say this power bottleneck is huge and insurmountable and we need to have a mobilization, the likes of which we’ve never seen in the energy sector to solve it. On the other hand, if they don’t solve it, if the world doesn’t solve it, I should say they’re probably better positioned than anybody to snatch up the scarce resource that is the available power supply in the sense that if they are going to be forced to build their own capacity, which many folks are doing, who’s in a better position to write long lead orders, GE Vernova turbines than the hyperscalers who have big balance sheets and can afford to pay for it and so on. So there is an extent to which if you’re scared of the neo clouds for example, and you’re a hyperscaler, you don’t necessarily entirely want the world to solve the power bottleneck for you because it’s sort of a source of competitive advantage at least against that other class. My guess is that between those two incentives, the one that says no, we just want the world to solve the power problem, our job is AI. That’s probably the one that wins out, but it doesn’t seem pure as the driven snow to me that it’s like that clear,
Shanu Mathew: You hit it on the head, right? I think it’s really, really complex when you pull it back the layers. I think the one thing I would add is that a lot of the motivator for spending all those CapEx is that each dollar of capacity not online that could be serving additional demand is revenue dollars that you’re not making. And so that opportunity cost is so great of not having power. So to your point, you may be comfortable especially on, for example, a gigawatt data center being 50 billion, spending X dollars of millions of dollars procuring deposits for long lead items, turbines, electrical equipment, switchgears, circuit breakers, et cetera, just to make sure that the long lead items are actually settled to build. So if the power is there that you can go ahead and plug the shells in immediately, but there is an ability to walk away or cancel or just lose a deposit of contracts as well.
But their incentive would be to lock up as much capacity to your point as possible, right? Because they want to have the optionality, but I think they also are playing for worst case scenario, you could walk away from a few million dollar deposits and I’m just speaking hypothetically here versus the opportunity cost of building a multi-billion dollar data center. So there is all these different levers they can pull, but it definitely feels that they’re keeping optionality. And just to be clear too, they are bringing on a lot of their own capacity, like Amazon brought on 3.8 gigawatts in the last 12 months, so they’re going to double their footprint in the next two years. Microsoft said they’re going to double as well and they brought on two gigawatts in the last 12 months. So they are bringing on a ton of capacity as well. But it is just interesting to see. They’re also striking deals in neo cloud. So the bull would say that there’s nowhere near enough supply and that they’re forced to do that and the bear would say, well actually there is want the speculative risk to go to the neo clouds and then they can walk away from the contracts if market conditions deteriorate. And I think no one really knows. Time will tell.
Shayle Kann: All right, there’s another grouping of actors here where my first instinct to say is that it actually is straightforward what their incentives are, which is let’s just say OEMs of hardware to data centers. That could be you’re selling equipment inside the data center or maybe not even hardware. Let’s include EPCs here for example as well. Your job is to provide services or hardware into the build of data centers. My first thought would be everybody there is aligned in their incentive to promote the power scarcity narrative. It just furthers the argument that there is limitless demand for their services and we’re just going to sell out as much as we possibly can. Do you think it’s more complex than that?
Shanu Mathew: I think that one is pretty straightforward. To your point is that just going back to our prior point about long lead time items and the most constrained, a lot of this is equipment as well as the labor. Those are the direct beneficiaries. What do they get? They get higher backlogs, they get longer duration backlogs, they get better pricing in typically industries where you basically get minimal pricing or as much as the market will bear. Whereas now you pricing power for the first time and generations for certain equipment providers, for certain labor producers. So this one is pretty straightforward and you see that across the earnings. You can look at the earnings transcripts of companies like Quanta, like record backlog, moss tech talking about record activity in their pipeline business as well as really a strong even clean energy pipeline. You can go to the equipment or you see something like a Vertiv, which has a backlog that was up 30% organically year over year, you have eaten, which is up 20% backlog organically, year over year on billion dollar books of business.
And so I think that’s what you’ll see to your point, a very limited narrative on talking down the potential market opportunity. Because if you think about it from their point of view, it’s just more and more business. To your point, equipment as you are power scarce, you need the latest and greatest to be the most power efficient per square foot or per it capacity per megawatt of it capacity. And so you always want the latest and greatest and often the highest priced equipment as well as you want to continually get the latest generation, which requires you to size up the load of your equipment in terms of the labor, if labor is the most constrained element, that means that you’ll agree to perhaps a higher degree of pricing that you normally would where if conditions were scarce, you may be forced to just take or whatever conditions that your buyers are willing to take.
So for example, electricians and plumbers we’re incredibly scarce there right now. I mean there’s market chatter of companies like the hyperscalers flying out, electricians from various parts of the country, they don’t have enough labor. So you can imagine for the ZPC companies, pricing power is great because they’re the only ones that have labor and can actually go out and deploy these projects. In an environment where that doesn’t look as favorable, you have to agree to tighter terms, you have less overall projects to work on, you have more than enough supply of labor folks, that means that your market will slow down and your pricing slow down. So that is a vicious down cycle in terms of what happens on the other side of a growth cycle. So this bucket generally, I agree with you straightforward talk up the business opportunity, it generally is positive and supportive for their businesses.
Shayle Kann: Alright, so let’s talk about another one that I think of as being a little bit more complex then, which is utilities on one hand, utilities are in the same position as everybody else we’ve discussed, which is basically like, look, if there’s a huge bottleneck and power clearly demand for their services, in this case electrons is going to be through the roof, they’re going to be able to spend more CapEx, they should get higher earnings, this should be good for utilities. And so of course they would want to talk up the power scarcity narrative. On the other hand, folks sometimes blame the utilities for the power scarcity challenge and who is there to solve it, but them to some extent. So there’s probably some limit to the extent to which they can blame or place the limitation of AI growth on power scarcity. So I wonder how you think about them and what you’ve been hearing from them when they talk in public market contexts.
Shanu Mathew: Definitely I think this is one of the positions that is not enviable for a lot of different market players, especially those in the other buckets. You bring up a great point where on the one side generational CapEx cycle, I can get a guaranteed ROE on my investments and I can put through more investments on. The downside is that we are increasingly seeing the political issues around rising electricity rates as well as folks being against having data centers in their local environment. So I’m like the positive side, it’s like a potential business opportunity. On the negative side, I’m getting increasing amounts of pushback and ultimately utilities are regulated. They need to answer to a public utility commission and get the infrastructure they need approved. And so now they’re in this interesting predicament where they have to solve for all these limitations. They have to bring on as much infrastructure as possible, but also do it at the lowest cost or at least the most efficient use of dollars such that they can’t be blamed for inefficiently spending capital or artificially in inflating demand.
So I think utilities were the last few quarters you talked or even precise the last one to two years. It was a lot more talking about the gigawatt pipeline and how much they’re growing and you have folks throwing out tens of gigawatts in their pipeline or hundreds of gigawatts and now it’s talking a little bit more about how can we bring these gigawatts on in a very effective way and then ensuring that they have the labor, they have the equipment, they have the ability to execute on this quickly. Some of these are also in regions where they’re impacted by regulatory impacts such as Texas with SB six or PJM just actually went through and they couldn’t get to a resolution on what’s the approach to large load tariffs. But you’re right, utilities are conflicted in the sense of they don’t want to miss out on the opportunity if they can’t bring on the power or they aren’t permitted to bring on the power. Someone will take their load elsewhere to a different utility. And so they are in the business of problem solving right now, whereas we last one to two years talk up the opportunity. Now it’s in the realm of can I do this effectively and cost efficiently?
Shayle Kann: How do you think about the, there’s another category which is I’ll group together real estate owners, landowners and then the powered land developers, the developers who are going off and trying to find sites and make them powered and then sell them to a colo or a hyperscaler or whoever. What’s their incentive?
Shanu Mathew: Their incentive is to talk up the constraints as well because it increases the value of the S to their owning, which is the real estate or the powered land bank. If we think about solving, again, if there’s a constraint, that means that anything that accelerates you through the constraint is valuable or increases in value as a constraint gets worse or it remains. And so if I have a powered land bank, that means that I can move a lot faster than someone that has just a plot of land that has no interconnection access or anything like that. So I can charge a more premium price to developers or neo clouds, et cetera, anyone else that would want to be further along up the development cycle. And so they’re generally universally talking up the opportunity that they have and the ability to move faster. I’d say a lot of what we’re seeing there is, or at least what we hear from chatter wise is that you have transaction values that are much higher than they’ve ever been, or at least in recent cycles as folks all are chasing the similar opportunities.
So pretty much any land banks that are powered that are near plentiful energy sources, something like in the northeast with near gas fields or in West Texas, you’re seeing construction activity be plentiful because people think that it’s a much faster path to value realization. So you’re seeing that increasingly move up. I think one tall tale signal or maybe a leading indicator that could start to suggest weakness is if you start to see real estate offerings that are power that are near tier one cities or have really good access to energy infrastructure or fiber infrastructure that don’t get a premium value or struggling to sell in the market. That would be an interesting indicator that perhaps the market’s not as strong as possible, but at least right now the market indicators would suggest that that value is considerable. People are still focused on time to power right now.
Shayle Kann: All right, I want to move on to the chip players. They’re an interesting one here. If you think about NVIDIA’s incentives, on one hand they share the incentives that most of these other folks do of let’s play up the power constraint in the hope that it gets solved. On the other hand, they want to be making the argument that we are just going to sell effectively infinite chips forever, we’re just going to sell so many more GPUs. And if power is a real constraint on that, that’s the limiting factor and it’s kind of outside their control, then one would think that would affect their perceived value and their perceived growth, I would say. But my sense is that Nvidia is talking kind of like the hyperscalers and really the story they’re telling is this is a major constraint. I mean possibly just because it’s true, but maybe that’s their incentive as well.
Shanu Mathew: Yes, and I think they actually, again, this is all very hypothetical game theory, but if you are in Nvidia, right, you are pitching that you are getting the best performance token per watt is what Jensen will call it, and basically arguing that they can extract the most tokens per wat useful energy. And so they’re giving you the lowest cost efficient dollar to the highest level of performance. And so that actually gives them pricing power, right? Because since we are power constrained and that constraint is expected to get worse and power prices rise, the NVIDIA chip holders actually the TCO advantage that they have versus less efficient chips actually goes up in that scenario. So they actually continue to do better as power remains constrained, it reinforces their pricing power. And so this introduces the interesting angle where custom silicon, for example, for those TPUs are all the raised this week, even though they’ve been in existence for a while, there’s arguments that you can find more purposeful chips for certain workloads that require less energy draws.
And if you weren’t as constrained on energy or you might be willing to use some of those chips, that actually erodes your pricing power for Nvidia, right? Because the idea is we’re power constrained. I want to get the maximum amount of knowledge for every dollar I spend, and I can do that right now with Nvidia chips that I might not be able to do with custom silicon chips. And so it actually reinforces their competitive advantage. And so they have kind of an interesting angle here where to your point, they’re going to sell more and more chips and you need power to bring online those chips, but they also probably want the market to remain tight because the longer it’s tight, the better their pricing power actually ends up being.
Shayle Kann: So on balance, basically everybody we’ve talked about so far, sometimes it’s nuanced, but pretty much everybody is incentivized to play up the power bottleneck. And indeed they are. It is also real, but they are playing it up. Who do you think is on the other side of this equation? Who is incentivized to say that power is not such a big bottleneck?
Shanu Mathew: And I think this part’s a little bit more interesting too, to your point, I feel like a lot of people benefit if the power constraint remains. And that’s just like an okay thing to observe. It’s just facts or facts. But on the other side, I call it a few buckets. And the first that I think is independent power producers, and this might seem counterintuitive, but let me lay out my logic is if you’re an independent power producer, that means that you have a fleet of existing assets today, those generate money based on selling into electricity markets. And so the input to their revenue is electricity prices. If we’re in scarce conditions and those continue to grow, they generate a really healthy incremental margin on that, right? Because they’re not really building out new assets. You have slightly higher o and m perhaps by running your assets harder, but you’re just flowing through a high electricity price that is extremely profitable for them.
And that’s actually been the thesis for a lot of owning these assets. So these are the constellations, the talons, the energies of the world. One thing I noticed that’s interesting, if you look at the last two earnings calls you have the folks like the CEO of Constellation talking about the fact that energy prices actually aren’t supportive of building new gas plants, which may or may not be true. And that there’s different items that we have or levers to pull flexibility or things of Tyler Norris’s suggestion of throttling workloads when you’re at peak conditions to enable more excess capacity to be built and used today. I think that’s interesting that the IPPs are talking out of that because if you game theory it out, it basically is suggesting that perhaps they don’t want a lot of new supply to enter the market because what does that do that potentially dampens prices?
And I just laid out a path where they can generate a lot more healthier EBITDA if they can sell into higher or appreciating power price markets. And so I think that’s someone that is probably trying to downplay the impact just because their value in the marketplace goes up as long as it’s constraint remains. And another area that I think is a little bit more interesting too, and it’s almost a derivative of how the market works, but like L and G providers for example, a lot of them just signed very long-term contracts. And then the basic arbitrage in US l and g is you buy cheap domestic gas and then you sell it to other markets like Asia or Europe to be able to sell into premium markets. Their model actually gets a little bit into trouble here, or the ARB gets less interesting if domestic gas prices rise, right?
Because you go from taking a cheap input to a rapidly inflating input that’s maybe no longer cheap, and that kills your ARB on the other side too. So they’re probably incentivized as well to talk down some of the power issues to ensure that the supply goes to them versus going to a local market that they can be served much more profitably as well. So that’s two areas at least that came to mind in terms of the other side of the trade where perhaps trying to talk down the power constraint issue so that new supply doesn’t enter the market and have to continue to raise your prices. That also another area would be like, just think about this a lot loud now, is the natural gas E&Ps also as well. If everyone’s just chasing this glut, then you probably bring on more production that actually keeps a lid on your prices when you want prices to be rising. So I think the way to think about this one is who benefits from a rising input price to their business models? And they’re probably in the camp of talking down expectations.
Shayle Kann: That’s where I guess of those three groups, I think the IPPs and the natural gas ENP companies are kind of aligned. They both benefit from high prices of their commodity, so they don’t want a ton of new capacity to get built. That’s just good for them. The LNG folks are on the other side of that trade. They’re buying the natural gas that gets produced and selling into another market. So they don’t want prices to rise. They do want more production, they want as much drilling as possible. And so then our gets bigger. So for them, again, this is complicated game theory, but with the l and g players, you’d think they’d want to say, oh, they should be telling you that we’re talking about the power bottleneck. It’s actually a natural gas bottleneck. We need to be drilling so so much more. And if that happens, then it keeps their prices low and keeps their R big.
Shanu Mathew: So that’s really interesting point though, right? Yes, they want natural gas production to be high, that means low, but they also don’t want local sources of demand to accelerate because that means you have a lot more willing buyers, in this case, gas power plants. So if a bunch of CCGTs go up, then all of a sudden you have a local buyer that’s willing to pay a premium price that raises the input price for them. They want to buy cheap net gas, but all of a sudden if you have local demand that goes incredibly higher, you’re competing with another source and producer might be able to go to somewhere else versus you, and that impacts your ability to serve your contracts on a longer term time horizon. So it is complicated as you start to peel the onions, the layers of the onion back, you start to see all this. There is general incentives for and against it within all these pockets, but it is hard to parse out without going through these exercises and say, who benefits in what market? And that’s the rule or the role that investors play as we’re generally trying to underwrite the range of scenarios, good, bad, neutral, and then probability, weight, what’s most likely to happen.
Shayle Kann: Maybe taking a step back, I guess just to wrap it up, it seems clear to me that this narrative, this general narrative of the power bottleneck has taken hold substantially over the past. I don’t know, you tell me, but 12, 18 months, something like that is when it’s really taken hold. How would you describe the sentiment around that narrative today? And have you seen it changing at all? Is the fervor growing right now? Where are we in the trajectory of people talking about this problem?
Shanu Mathew: Yeah, I’d characterize it at a high level. The last one to two years was really just getting our heads around the issue. What’s the source of this demand? How strong is it? And that’s largely driven by GPUs and say, all right, we need the latest and greatest to train our models scaling laws hold. That means we can justify more investment and we’ll continue to perpetuate the cycle. I think what it turned into recently now is folks are getting into that ROIC question is all the dollars that we’re spending, which is on the order of half a trillion dollars now a year, is that generating positive ROIC? And that question mandates, are they generating revenue and dollars from it? And so that moves you upstream to, okay, are folks actually doing that? And then that leads to that area where there’s the question of, if I had more supply, could I generate more dollars?
And would the ROIC on each of those dollars be positive? And that’s the part that we’re right now is what is the real constraint here. If you talk to a lot of the providers that sell AI solutions, it’s because we don’t have enough power shells or power to get more supply online, and I’d be able to generate more dollars. But I think that’s the real question is if said another way, if we had unlimited power, unlimited constraints, now that were all solved, would the AI trajectory still be as strong as it is today? And that’s the question that we’re getting into is which constraints of these are solvable? And if those constraints are relieved, does the cycle perpetuate positive for that player or negative? And I think right now, as folks are trying to answer that question, and that’s why you see kind of the gyrations that you do in the market every other day where, for example, a lot of the AI power trade or AI, plumbing trade, whatever you want to call it for physical infrastructure, has done tremendously well for the last few years. I think folks oftentimes think about it as just nvidia, but the names a lot of the companies that we talked about earlier, like the, sorry, the EPCs, the MEP subcontractors, the networking and optical connectivity equipment, the switch gears, the circuit breakers, the transformers, the chillers, all these people have benefited. And so now it’s just about the durability of those constraints, because that’s ultimately what we’re trading on now, is the 2, 3, 4 years outward, can they actually grow into what the valuations have grown to.
Shayle Kann: All right, Shanu, this was fun. Thank you for helping me think through all the complicated incentives that are out there, mainly to just talk about how big a problem power is, but we’ll have you back on when things take a turn as they inevitably will.
Shanu Mathew: Yeah, it’ll be fun to tag along and we’ll see what happens here. And the narratives are always constantly changing and the market’s giving new opportunities to new narratives. So let’s circle back here in a year or two and see where we landed.
Shayle Kann: Shanu Mathew is a senior vice president and portfolio manager for US Sustainable Equity at Lazard. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitude media.com for links to today’s topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode is produced by Daniel Woldorff, mixing a theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
