It's what our entire industry right now, frankly, is arguing, whether these data centers can actually be made flexible and whether we can build them as such.

There is a real economic trade-off between flexibility and speed to power, and certainly one of the instruments to address this is sort of forced flexibility, and that would be, "Hey, if you want access to the grid, you have to agree to be flexible in these and these conditions." My view is that there could also be proactive flexibility where you look at your workloads that you're planning to run within the data center, and you say, "Look, actually, economically, I'm willing to curtail a certain percentage of the hours of the year because it makes economic sense for me to not run my data center when energy prices go above a certain threshold." And so it's almost like there's a demand curve of, hey, for every one percent or five percent or ten percent of flexibility I can offer economically to the utility, how does that influence how fast I can get connected onto the grid? Uh, and that's actually the subject of some upcoming research that I have in a paper I'm co-writing with another organization that actually is measuring the cost of delay and has a whole metric around that.

Well, we're saying, "Well, for how much speed to power will you offer what amount of flexibility, and where is the break-even point that makes sense economically for both parties of that, of that trade?" And the compute heat rate is one metric that helps you understand the flexibility economics.

And again, the more that can make rational sense to all counterparties, I think the more scalable those types of l- solutions become over time.

So I, I take the optimist, uh, angle to that question, and I think that, that, that's, that's what I would, would like to see, uh, happen rather than that, uh, a ten percent, uh, you know, humanitarian, humanity's destruction, uh, that AD brought up.

Look, I see both a, a risk and a tremendous opportunity.

Um, so what could happen in the next twelve or eighteen months to change my view I'm always an optimist, so I always think markets will figure things out, and I'm frankly an optimist about the future of AI.

But the social license to operate is super important right now, and I think the economics suggest that there is a big opportunity for data centers to invest in new technologies, to pay their own way, so to speak, do it in a smart way that actually does result into reduced costs for everyone else on the grid.

In terms of frontier models versus cloud computing, what are these levels at and what does it mean for a utility or a power generator or a regulator?

Absolutely.

So number one, I think the biggest point is that while the blended rate, I talk about it a lot because it is pretty staggering.

Look, the blended compute heat rate across workloads types is north of $5,000 per megawatt hour for long run compute heat rate.

which means essentially it answers one question, you know, or one main question, which is at what electric power price would it not make sense to build the next data center, right? In terms of, and that includes in the formula, you know, it's on the website, you can see it there, but it includes a margin and includes, you know, the non-electric costs, et cetera.

Electric power would have to get above $5,631 for it not to make sense economically to convert electrons into intelligence anymore at current rates.

So that's interesting.

um how should that decline be interpreted and you know at what point would falling chr actually begin to matter for for generation investment or load forecasts