Hardware Podcasts

AI scaling pathways: on grid, on edge, off grid, off planet

Catalyst · 12 Mar 2026 · 42m

What this episode covers

Jake Elder, Senior Vice President of Research and Innovation at Energy Impact Partners, joins host Shayle Kann to evaluate four pathways for scaling AI compute infrastructure: grid-connected, edge, off-grid, and orbital. They analyze the specific constraints of each, noting that grid-connected data centers face infinite transmission timelines, while off-grid solutions struggle with reliability and the complexity of building 'shock absorbers' for power quality. The discussion concludes with a 10-year forecast predicting that hyper-scale grid-connected facilities will remain dominant, though off-grid and orbital options may capture small but significant shares if demand scales massively.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Energy Impact Partners, Stripe, Pace Microgrids, Waymo, AWS, Azure, Google, NVIDIA, Meta, SpaceX, Tesla, XAI
Products
ChatGPT, Gemini, Starlink, Starship
Also
Hilana

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