00:00 Josh
If all technical challenges were answered, if the regulatory challenges were answered, it’s a lot of ifs, but let’s say we did that. and you’re suggesting there the ultimate opportunity here, the ultimate market opportunity isn’t niche, it’s it’s massive. Where does the demand come from, Dan? How do you imagine, I mean is it utilities, defense, is it industrials? Walk me through it.
00:29 Dan
Yeah, well, first of all, it’s all the above. And one thing, uh earlier when you did talk about regulatory, the regulatory environment for fusion is totally different than it’s going to be for fusion in the traditional nuclear reactors that we’re all familiar with. See, this is clean nuclear with no risk of a meltdown. The actual regulatory environment is being set up where they will be a lot less red tape, more like heavy industrial manufacturing builds, as opposed to traditional nuclear approvals. So the approval period of time as a hurdle may be out of the way. Now, just very simply, I mean, I, you know, AI as we know it is going to drive something like 130 gigawatts, maybe as much as 150 gigawatts of demand just by the end of the, you know, by the end of the decade. And so that’s somewhere around 10 to 15% of the entire load. And the difference with AI, of course, as you know, is it’s pervasive. And so peak load on AI is going to be pulling from the grid all the time. So that alone is a problem that this can genuinely help solve. But then of course, you have the rest of the load that needs to be dealt with, and that’s all the electrical, all the utilities that yes, that we are used to every day. And this of course, is that affordability issue, Josh, that’s been so popular over time is how do we make the data center buildouts, make sure the United States can continue to lead, kind of, uh push back on Senator Bernie Sanders and his idea to stop data centers and say, hey, we can keep innovating as the United States, and we can keep building data centers and be the world’s leader in AI, but at the same time, that doesn’t come have to come at the cost of our citizens being paid, you know, being charged more and more for electricity for their everyday uses.
02:22 Josh
So I get you out here on this, Dan. Let let’s say I’m an investor. I’m watching this, Dan. How do I tell when we’ve crossed from, you know, hype and excitement, right? To actually something real, something commercially viable. What what are the signs? What are the signals, Dan, I need to be on the lookout for?
02:45 Dan
Yeah, that’s going to be one of the big moments, but unfortunately, once this happens, it’s going to have run away from you. So I think some of the early momentum that the stock is getting. I think it’s up like 40% today, is that people, uh, as your reporter said before, are piling into this trade. They’re speculating because if this is the right technology, this isn’t a one or two X opportunity. This is going to be a 10, 100 plus X opportunity. So people are piling in early. If they have a successful experiment, you know, over the next one to two years and they’re able to get this next generation showing power positivity, and then of course, they’re able to make that 2031 moment, getting to 50 megawatts. because again, that’s a small fraction of what their ultimate machines they expect to do. They’re expecting 300 to 500 inside of a unit that could fit in a sub 10,000 square foot building. So if we get from here to there, um, over the next five years, but there are these milestones, there is this two-year net positive. There is this five-year uh opportunity to build these first power plants. But I really do believe, Josh, that this is one of those things that you’re going to get a lot of momentum early because we really don’t have a choice. You know, this is the United States Manhattan Project. Over in Asia right now, their Manhattan Project is building uh lithography. They’re trying to get to EUV. Well for the United States, we’ve done that, we’ve accomplished between us and Taiwan the ability to build the most advanced chips where we’ve fallen behind is power. This is one of, if not the answer to that problem. So policy aside, politics aside, Josh, we should all be rooting for this to win.
04:36 Josh
Dan, always great to see you, buddy. Thank you.
04:39 Dan
Thanks for having me.