AI will help build the energy it needs.
That's the case U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing Ian Buck made Thursday morning at the SCSP AI+ Expo. The 30-minute fireside chat, moderated by SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari, was called Powering the Next American Century.
Their argument: American leadership in AI runs through American leadership in energy.
Energy is life, Wright said. The more energy you have, the more affordable energy you have, the more opportunities you have in your society.
The Genesis Mission - the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s effort to apply AI to scientific discovery - is where that case meets execution. NVIDIA is among the DOE partners on the mission, building on what Buck called two decades of NVIDIA building supercomputers with the national labs.
NVIDIA is 100% committed and invested in Genesis, Buck said. I've never seen more excitement across the lab and industry.
From left: NVIDIA's Ian Buck, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari onstage at the SCSP AI+ Expo. The session was one of several SCSP panels this week with NVIDIA leaders on stage: Cofounder and NVIDIA Fellow Chris Malachowsky will lead a panel on the AI+ Careers Workforce Task Force; Rev Lebaredian will speak on physical AI and simulation; Dion Harris will discuss AI-accelerated American science and AI infrastructure for Africa; and John Josephakis will join a session on U.S. quantum leadership.
The DOE Partnership The DOE brings 17 national labs, the scientists, the national problems and the data. NVIDIA brings the full stack - not just chips, Buck said, but algorithms, methods and 20 years of partnership with the labs.
The work is happening at scale. NVIDIA and the DOE are building two AI supercomputers together at Argonne National Laboratory. The first, Equinox, is being stood up now with 10,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs - what Buck called the same GPU, the same software being used to train and build AI that we're all enjoying today. The second, Solstice, will use 100,000 GPUs with NVIDIA Vera Rubin.
To put that 100,000 in perspective on the next-generation GPU, which is dedicated to science, it's 5,000 exaflops, Buck said. That's a big number that actually is five times larger than the entire TOP500 supercomputer list combined.
We're creating all the same technology, all the same hardware, all the same software building blocks used by all the major AI labs around the world, Buck said, for all of world science to go get access to.
What that looks like in practice: Buck described an open source NVIDIA AI model trained on 1.5 million physics papers, then fine-tuned on 100,000 papers specifically about fusion. The result is a specialized AI agent DOE researchers can interrogate to advance their work faster.
Energy and the Pace of Building Over the last 20 years, Wright said, the U.S. has tripled oil production and doubled natural gas production - but barely grown electricity production. That's a problem because, as Wright put it, the most important source of energy for AI is electricity.
His department is leaning back into all three pillars of the U.S. grid: natural gas, nuclear and coal.
On nuclear, Wright pointed to small modular reactors as a near-term lever - three small modular reactors (SMRs) will go critical by July 4 of this year, he said, with both new large reactors and additional SMRs to follow.
On fusion, his department has stood up a strategic fusion office, and the lab and university programs are being, in his words, hypercharged by the computing power and insights AI now provides.
We have to fix this bureaucratic and complex electricity grid so that it can grow fast, so that it can grow like our primary energy production and it can keep up with AI, Wright said. If we don't do that, we're going to slow down AI.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has described AI as a five-layer cake: energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications. Wright's department covers the bottom layer.
Buck took up the next layer. Asked about the intersection of energy and AI, he pointed to per-watt efficiency gains in NVIDIA chips with each generation.
We went from the Hopper generation to Blackwell, Buck said. We increased performance by 30x. We actually increased performance per watt by 25 times.
Wright returned to the grid. AI, he said, can break the bottleneck of grid interconnection studies that today take years.
With AI, we're going to take something that was years long and make it weeks or hours, Wright said.
What Success Looks Like Asked what success looks like 12 months in, Wright pointed to fusion, materials and grid interconnection - concrete deliverables.
We will have deliverables that we're going to point to - we couldn't do that before, and now we can, Wright said. That's the goal of Genesis: drive discovery and bring the benefits to humans.
There's growing public concern that AI and data centers will drive up electricity costs, he noted. The reality, Wright said, runs the other way: Building more electrical generation, building data centers, are actually the mechanism to lower the cost of electricity in our country and make our grid stronger.
AI and energy are both key to human progress.
AI doesn't love, it doesn't have passion, Wright said. It's just going to make humans more powerful and better at pursuing whatever your passions are. It's a thing that supercharges humans - it does not replace you.
The Next Generation of AI Begins It all starts here.
June 1-2 | Taipei
Register Now
Recent News
Gaming
Linked and Loaded: Gaijin Single Sign-On Now Available on GeForce NOW May 7, 2026
Networking
NVIDIA Spectrum-X - the Ope
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
08/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
08/05/2026
Liberty University on why broadcast technology isn't just a technical invest...
08/05/2026
COW Jobs: UGC, On-Camera Video Content
Brie Clayton May 7, 2026
0 Comments
UGC, On-Camera Video Content
April 17, 2026Documentary Editor - US,......
07/05/2026
Journalists reporting on Sudan are working in one of the most complex and fast-m...
07/05/2026
Multi-year partnership positions Victory+ as a free home for Dallas Cowboys orig...
07/05/2026
From sideline reporting to directing and producing, the talented sophomore is building a well-rounded foundation for a career in live sports production
In the ...
07/05/2026
Cobalt Digital has received two Future Best of Show awards at NAB Show 2026. The COBALT blueCORE platform was recognized by TV Tech, and the COBALT PACIFIC ULL-...
07/05/2026
ESPN analyst Mina Kimes will host the televised semifinals and finals of the 202...
07/05/2026
Bitmovin has announced that MUBI, the global film streaming platform, has selected Bitmovin as its cloud VOD encoding partner. Bitmovin's encoding infrastru...
07/05/2026
NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises and the U.S. Soccer Federation have announced...
07/05/2026
Angel City Football Club (ACFC) and Victory have announced a regional broadcast partnership bringing live match coverage to fans across the greater Los Angeles...
07/05/2026
Spiideo has announced the launch of AI Highlights inside Spiideo Play, its automated sports production platform. AI Highlights combines video, event data, audio...
07/05/2026
Leostream Corporation has announced a unified remote access ecosystem for high-p...
07/05/2026
The Atlanta Dream has partnered with Victory to stream all locally broadcast Dream games for free, expanding the team's digital distribution strategy and g...
07/05/2026
Riedel Communications has announced the appointment of Marc Engroff as Chief Fin...
07/05/2026
SES and ARD, Germany's largest public broadcasting network, have announced a long-term extension of their satellite distribution partnership through 2039. U...
07/05/2026
UpLight Technologies delivers a flexible video and lighting system for a new televised sportLaunching the Pro Cheer League required more than creating a compell...
07/05/2026
Full Day Productions and GSE Worldwide have announced Spikes Under the Lights, a...
07/05/2026
Seit dem Start im Jahr 2023 hat DJ (Beta) das personalisierte H rerlebnis von 94...
07/05/2026
Da quando stata presentata nel 2023, DJ (beta) ha aiutato a definire un'esperienza d'ascolto pi personalizzata per 94 milioni di utenti Spotify Premi...
07/05/2026
Since launching in 2023, DJ (beta) has helped shape a more personalized listenin...
07/05/2026
Desde o lan amento em 2023, o DJ (beta) j ajudou a deixar a experi ncia de ouvi...
07/05/2026
From our earliest days, Spotify has been built on a simple principle: Great audio should be easy to reach. It's what's driven us to expand from music to...
07/05/2026
Asian and Pacific Islander artists continue to shape the global soundscape, pushing creative boundaries and connecting with fans worldwide. This Asian & Pacific...
07/05/2026
Company announce long-requested choir instrument
In the latest expansion of their Symphonic Elements series, UJAM have introduced an all-new vocal instrumen...
07/05/2026
Modular-inspired sound generation with digital control
Buchla have introduced Ziggy, a new compact synthesizer built around the company's complex oscill...
07/05/2026
Combines analogue voices with digital synthesis and sequencing
Polyend have announced Drums, a new hybrid analogue and digital drum machine that combines sy...
07/05/2026
Control surface now officially supports four DAWs
When Nektar launched the Panorama CS12 control surface, it worked exclusively with Apple's Logic Pro, ...
07/05/2026
In the first quarter 2026, SGL Carbon generated consolidated sales of 184.5 million, which was 49.8 million, or 21.3%, lower than in the prior year (Q1 2025: ...
07/05/2026
Rohde & Schwarz and Greenerwave achieve precise and fast ESA antenna characteriz...
07/05/2026
Two multi-role L3Harris products - the Red Wolf launched effects vehicle and SK...
07/05/2026
L3Harris will be developing key features of a secure and resilient digital infra...
07/05/2026
Alysa Liu and Shohei Ohtani Help Drive Viewership as 91 of the Top 100 Broadcast...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
Cobalt Digital Wins Two Future Best of Show Awards at 2026 NAB Show
Manufacturer Recognized by TV Tech and TVBEurope for Innovation in signal processing
Cobal...
07/05/2026
Software and hardware platforms, AI power and user-friendliness on show...
07/05/2026
Intinor will demonstrate its latest technical enhancements for the Direkt series at BroadcastAsia 2026. With a continued focus on reliable contribution and remo...
07/05/2026
Bitmovin has announced that MUBI has chosen Bitmovin as its cloud VOD encoding partner, replacing MUBI's legacy on premises encoding setup to improve scalab...
07/05/2026
Meet Graduates from Berklees Class of 2026 Members of this years graduating class reflect on their proudest moments at Berklee and look ahead to whats next.
...
07/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/05/2026
At BroadcastAsia 2026, Interra Systems will demonstrate its latest innovations in automated quality control (QC), real-time monitoring, and captioning. The comp...
07/05/2026
At this year's Broadcast Asia, PlayBox Neo is set to unveil recent innovations across its PlayBox Neo Suite and integrated range of broadcast media solution...
AI will help build the energy it needs.
