Catalyst · 6 Feb 2025 · 47m
Nat Bullard, co-founder of data insights company Halcyon and former chief content officer at BloombergNEF, discusses 2025 energy trends with host Shayle Kann. They analyze the divergence between record solar installations and stagnating wind power, the massive curtailment of renewable energy in California and negative pricing in Europe, and the surprising efficiency of the DeepSeek AI model. The conversation also covers the rapid global export of Chinese plug-in hybrid vehicles, the critical shortage of new high-voltage transmission infrastructure, and the shifting economics of data center power consumption.
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Chris Gammell details his new 13kW solar and Tesla Powerwall 3 installation, discussing the economics of virtual power plants and peak pricing. Dave Jones analyzes Australia's energy market, highlighting negative wholesale prices and the high cost of peak power generation. The hosts also discuss the impact of new US tariffs on the global electronics supply chain and the challenges of designing with tiny 0.35mm pitch BGA components.
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company host a panel with Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, Steve Tuck, and Mike Cafarella to review past predictions and forecast trends for 2025, 2028, and 2031. The group discusses the failure of agentic AI, the rise of AI efficiency and open weights models like DeepSeek, and the potential for a chip crisis due to geopolitical tensions and Intel's struggles. They also predict shifts in hardware markets, including NVIDIA's Blackwell struggles, AMD's software acquisitions, and the resurgence of manufacturing as a VC focus.
Hosts Daniel and Forbode recap their top four episodes from 2022, covering biomimicry inspired by dandelion seeds, AI curiosity models like DALL-E, wearable sleep apnea detection, and sustainable hydropower turbines. They discuss the ethical implications of generative AI, the challenges of explaining complex topics like reinforcement learning to a lay audience, and their podcast's growth metrics, including a shift in global listenership away from the US. The hosts also outline goals for 2023, such as improving community engagement, producing better swag, and rebranding the show.
Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze recent earnings from Apple, Qualcomm, ARM, and MediaTek, highlighting severe mobile supply chain bottlenecks and soft demand driven by elevated memory costs and foundry capacity constraints. They discuss skyrocketing hyperscaler CapEx from Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, focusing on the transition from AI training to inference, the rise of behind-the-meter power solutions like Bloom Energy, and critical labor shortages in electrical trades. The episode concludes with an examination of market volatility linked to hedge fund unwinds and the increasing reliance on debt financing for data center expansion.
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze the market reaction to DeepSeek's new AI model, discussing its training efficiency, the skepticism surrounding its GPU usage claims, and the implications for AI infrastructure spending. They examine the 'Stargate' partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX, questioning the $100-500 billion valuation and the strategic shift away from Microsoft Azure. The hosts also explore the future of 'ambient agents' and the long-term economic thesis for AI compute demand.
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