Welcome to Goldman Sachs Exchanges.

I'm Alison Nathan and I'm here with George Lee, the co-head of our Goldman Sachs Global Institute.

Together we're co-hosting a series of episodes exploring the rise of AI and everything it could mean for companies, investors, and economies.

George, good to see you again. and everything it could mean for companies, investors, and economies.

George, good to see you again. Great to be here, Austin.

George, I'm very excited for this conversation because today we're going to discuss

one of the biggest questions about the rise of AI.

Where will the power come from?

We know that it consumes enormous amounts of power.

That's come up in a lot of our conversations.

And in the first episode of the series, I think you said it may be one of the biggest

constraints to the growth and development of AI.

So let's dig deeper into that.

Tell us why that is.

There's a temptation to think about AI as this sort of ephemeral phenomenon, the great chatbot in the sky.

The reality is this is one of the most physical technology infrastructures ever built.

Vast data centers filled with racks of servers and GPUs and other gear.

All of that gear requires enormous amount of power and

at a scale and density that probably has never been seen in the history of computation before.

That coming at the same time of a bunch of other emergent power needs in the world

has really made power kind of perhaps the most binding constraint or bottleneck on the delivery of the promises of AI.

And probably more interesting, it brings together two very orthogonal populations in our commercial ecosystem,

...