YouSaid · the spoken record
Casey Handmer
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- 104
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- 2025-08-15
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- 2025-08-15
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- 1
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“Terraform, it's very important to me that Terraform is the place that ambitious hardware people go to become the best they can be. That is really important. I'm not here to like check in and get your paycheck and optimize some shiny widget. It's still a small team. It's still one project per person kind of situation. And I will level you up maybe not quite like Jensen torch you into greatness kind of situation, but at times it's going to feel that way and you'll get to work with the best people that there are, at least on the west coast of the United States on this sort of thing. And it's also unique company. I thought years ago, like by now I'll have competition. We don't. No one else is doing this except for a small startup in the UK. And so you get it on the ground floor and it's going to be super cool technology. And eventually we get to go and build it all on Mars as well and like help our robot overlords make more of themselves out of dirt. It's pretty cool.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every hydrocarbon you could possibly want, another chemical ammonia process steel, desalination, and we can also make cement and a few other things. So basically everything that the primary industry does except for glass and paper. We are hiring. Our jobs are available on Terraform Industries.com. Yes, the website's meant to look like that because we're very cool. very special people. I know a lot of smart people and I'm privileged to work with some of the smartest people. I know we have mostly mechanical engineers. I will never hire anyone who can't do math. I will never have the problem an astronomer because we don't have a head of HR.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So actually, just to give you an introduction, Terraform is my day job. It's a company I founded almost four years ago. We are making synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. We are also working on other core primary materials stuff. We also have a methanol process methanol and methane together”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like literally electrons being pushed across the Fermi gap in a solar ray and then taking the return path through some set of gates, making decisions about things and then beaming lasers to their friends saying, hey, I just made up a new meme.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought about that before, but like there's this idea that evolution resulted in this continual ramification and complexification of the thermodynamic gradient. So you start with very simple RNA-based organisms and you get this like industrial economy. But it may be the case. I don't have a strong reason to suspect one way or the other that what we're seeing is the beginning stages of a collapse back towards the simplest possible thermodynamic to cognition stack which is A fusion in stars, and the inky blackness of space, and that provides our temperature gradient, and then the most efficient way to convert that into usable cognition is silicon.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you can start solving problems. It turns out that if you want to chemically reduce silicon, you can do it electrolytically with less efficiency and a bunch under a hydrogen-rich atmosphere or something. So one of the ways that silicon can be refined is by turning it into silane, which is a silicon tetrahydride. I'm not really a chemist, but I think that's right. So SIH4, which is a gas, it's like methane, but one down on the periodic table. And don't breathe it, though. And then once it's a gas, you can filter it from all the contaminants which don't form gases or can be separated by density, much like how uranium is sometimes enriched, but much, much less difficult. Heat it up to separate it back into p. silicon where you can then precipitate out of. I mean, the reason”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actual data has plenty of silicon in it. So, for example, setting up a brand new silicon refinery takes about 18 months. But that's just with the current technology. I actually think. We may find ways. So, one of the nice things is if you have infinite free solar power, approximately free solar power, you can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper? Less CapEx, less lead time, more power.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's pretty quick if you're like one kilowatt per square meter and then you use that just to rip oxygens off the underlying dirt. It doesn't take all that long. You need about 20 microns of silicon to make solar PVRA.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, if the software, like the area of the panel is kind of the variable there. So you can ask, well, what do you need in order to make the silicon making? Solar rays making chips as kind of multi stage process, but basically you start off with silicates, which are rocks, ideally in a relatively pure form. You chemically reduce them. A couple of different processes that can do that and then purify them into ideally like 69s of purity for solar ray or maybe 9-9s for really nice computers. Silicon Purity and Grow Crystals, cut wafers, et cetera, et cetera. So then the constraint is like, well, how quickly can you convert the crust into enough silicon to support silicon thought? Yeah. What is the silicon ecosystem look like?”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much are you? One square meter of silicon, like the thickness sheet of paper floating in space. Yeah, interesting. That's a future human form. That's my final form.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One human's worth of computation, one human brain can be simulated and roughly a square meter of silicon floating in space.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up to the thermal limit, and they can fly further from the sun to go and explore or like fly to other planets or something. And they can adjust the orientation of the solar sail with LCD panels so that it could be integrated into the... Into the wafer itself. I mean, that's actually, if you say, what's the post-human state? That's it. We will eventually be”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they can fly around their solar sails, and they're relatively dense, so they don't fly crazy fast, but they don't need to because they're the”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's also like all the way down. What silicon made off? Well, it's an element. It's chemically in the crust. There's no shortage of it.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you don't need a transformer. You don't even need a DCTC converter. You can actually make do with butt converter or with relays or whatever to basically match the current output of your solar array with the charge state of your batteries and the power consumption of your GPU or something. But like a solar array about the size of this desk, for example, will generate about 500 watts in full sun. So you could actually imagine... Aliens who have different silicon technology stack building their systems as like an integrated solar Computuranium in the middle, for example.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want Yeah, so you can ask a question, what do you need in order to run, like what is the minimum amount of matter that you need in order to perform these calculations? So right now we're talking about AR racking and grid and transmission and a bunch of ISOs and all that rest. You don't need any of that stuff, right? Obviously, XI is on top of this because the first thing that Elon will always ask is delete anything you don't absolutely need. So what you actually need is a big slab of relatively cheap silicon to make the power and then a small slab of relatively expensive silicon to do the thinking. And if it's in space, that's all you need, right? Because it's in the sun all the time. So you don't need a battery, right? But if you're on the Earth, you need a battery as well. So you need some interconnects.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Batteries, and not to mention the chips themselves. I've seen a dustal point, and then there's a cultural point as well, which is like that's already”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it could easily be much more than that because neurons are much slower. Than transistors, obviously. So probably 10 years ago, one of my friends reminded me, you know, like the way your phone saves power is it goes to sleep between you tapping out hello. It takes a nap for like 10,000 cycles. It's kind of nuts. So just that humans, I think Elon's talked about this in the context of self-driving cars as well, which is like anything humans do is like glacially slow from the perspective of a computer.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kind of discussed this earlier, but if you have like a megawatt of 10 acres of land feeding one megawatt H100 or something, it's generating, let's say, a megawatt is a thousand humans, so one acre is 1,000 humans worth of. Cognition. The implicit land value there is a lot higher than it is as undeveloped desert. It's also a lot higher than it is as the most productive farmland that humanity has ever had.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be worth much more than that in the sense of you can copy paste its output and much less than that in the sense that whatever the marginal additional cost of spooling up H100s is. And so if some kind of role comes along that the AIs are really well specialized at and outcompete the humans quickly, then we'd also expect to see that there both the cost of providing that service to drop drastically at the same time as the overall value generated in the economy by that service would increase a lot. Yeah.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then obviously, I still have some pricing power relative to humans and the AI thus has pricing power. But if it was the case that a new kind of job emerges that AI is really well adapted to. Because it's not competing against humans for most of those roles, it'll be competing against the other labs, right? And so you'd actually see the cost push down to a small multiple of whatever the marginal production cost of those tokens is. That would be my guess. So I think it might be a mistake to assume that, well, if we're going to pay a top AI researcher $200,000 a year, Lol, let's say the sort of AI researcher that I could beat $200,000 a year, that if an AI comes along that's as good as me at that, even taking into account the fact that realistically speaking, I only get maybe 10 hours of really top cognitive work done a week, that it would also be worth $200,000. Obviously, it's”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Year, right? It's 100 times per unit energy, oil, like gasoline is 100 times cheaper than the cheapest food that humans can digest. So, does that mean that we've shot ourselves in the foot by using oil to run our economy Because it's so cheap, like, no, right, right. And also”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oil's like $8 trillion a year or something, right? Yeah. But if you said, well, one day we're going to consume 100 times more energy in the form of oil than in the form of food. And per joule cost of food is whatever it is, the cost of a Big Mac, then oil should be like $800 trillion.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their peasant overlord or whatever. And nowadays we would giggle to think that like, oh, the amount of food we produce is meaningful in the context of the economic power of a particular country. Because 99% of the energy that we consume routes around our guts through the gas tanks of our cars and through our aircraft and our grids and stuff like that. And so right now... But the AI revolution is about routing around cognitive constraints that in some ways writing, you know, like writing Printing press computers, the internet have already allowed us to do to some extent. Credit card is a good example of something that routes around a cognitive constraint of building up a network of trust, right? It's a centralized trust.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, low band for sure. But if you think about someone trying to estimate the upper bound for the market value, the market cap of Caterpillar, right? Based on like, well, it takes this many men and burrows and wheelbarrows to dig a trench. And so, you know, it couldn't be more than that, right? But actually One way to think about the Industrial Revolutions is every time you figure out industrial revolution, what you're doing is you're finding some way of bypassing a constraint or bypassing a bottleneck. And the bottleneck prior to what we call the Industrial Revolution was metabolism. It's just like, how much oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output?”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we should constrain ourselves to being like, oh, well, maybe there'll be some fraction of current payroll, right? Because that's kind of a very contingent on humans being humans thing.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, in the limit, you can because you can put them on trucks and drive them around. So there could be a capacity market for batteries where you drive them around to people who need them at a pitch. In practice, it's going to be cheaper just to double the size of your battery. Because batteries can get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. But what it does mean is you can say, well, I know that I'm going to have three low days. So I will start curtailing now by 5% so I don't have to curtail by 50% in three days. And then overall for the whole year, I'll only curtail. You know, five hours, so I'm still at four nines instead of having to curtail 24 hours because I can't predict the weather.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can predict the amount of solar power you're going to get in three days pretty accurately because of weather prediction.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's just very clear that the average distance the electron is going to travel between generation and consumption is going to decrease in the future pretty radically.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means that the utilization of the batteries is on average like 300 days a year, and the utilization of your most expensive grid, highest voltage grid assets is much, much lower. And that includes the substations and transformers and stuff that serve that. So it's a really bad position to be in if you're a grid operator because you've got this aging existing thing that the batteries are cannibalizing, the batteries are being installed behind the meter, you don't have a say in whether they're being installed, how they're being used. All you know is that you're utilization of your asset where you get to charge top dollar for it is just dropping year after year after year after year. At the same time as your operating costs are increasing year after year after year.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you say, well, okay, we've got batteries that are performing this temporal arbitrage, and the sun comes up every day, right? The power swing from midday, you're otherwise curtailing the solar array to dusk when everyone's watching TV and cooking dinner or running the air conditioners to cool off in the evening is very predictable, right? Whereas like, oh, we had really bad weather, so we had to use the power line that runs to the extra power plants over by Hooverdam or something. Doesn't get used nearly as much. Or like its peak utilization happens almost never.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One way of thinking of this is what is your per capita allocation of batteries in kilograms per head? When you and I were much younger, the lithium-ion battery was in a cell phone space, so you're like, I don't know, 10 grams per person or something. And nowadays half the people in this town drive Teslas, so your per capita allocation of lithium-ion batteries, 100 kilograms or something like that. So we're talking like four or five ooms of increase of total battery per person. That trend is only going to continue.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have Batteries store power at one time of day, and they release it at another time of day. So batteries are performing a temporal arbitrage, an arbitrage over time. But they can be local or they can be more remote. I think we'll end up seeing batteries next to the solar rays and batteries in the middle of the grid at substations and batteries on the sites of existing power plants that get turned off and batteries in your house and batteries everywhere in between.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DOE would have us needing to build in the next 10 years versus how much actually being built. It's like it's not even in the same order of magnitude. So you say, well, are we totally screwed? The answer is no, we're not totally screwed because batteries actually do the same job that the grid does. But this is kind of weird to hear me out. The grid transports power from one place to another. It transports almost instantaneously at the speed of light. So it's actually performing a spatial arbitrage. So the idea being that right outside the local nuclear power plant, power is really cheap because they make a lot of it. And in your house, power is really expensive because you don't have a power plant in your house. And you pay the intermediator a small fee and they allow this trade to take place. And that's basically how the grid works. And until quite recently, the only way we had of meaningfully storing energy, like storing electricity on the grid was pumped hydro, and that only works in a handful of places and limited capacity. And it doesn't work all that well either. The efficiency is not great.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to be fair, I usually am fairly clear in my blog posts if I'm posting or if I'm serious. But this one, actually, I'm dead serious on. It's actually the one where it's like the most out of the money bed as well. Like everyone else that I considered to be like a respectable forecaster in this area disagrees with me on it. So that's one side. Well, so the grid, we know where the grid is expensive. It's a lot of wires strung up in hard to reach places that are hard to maintain, especially as the workforce ages and regulations and all the rest and eminent domain and so on and so forth. So grid's not going to get cheaper anytime soon or easier to build. And if you look at the projections of how much grid”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really great question. So, actually, you and I had a conversation along these lines almost two years ago when we first met. And it caused me to go and write a blog post. So this is a good way of thinking about it.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to be a bit balanced about this. It's like. I don't want it to drive species into extinction, but the meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal, basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change. We need solar synthetics for that part. We also need to do software injection and a couple of things”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which in many cases you don't need a permit for at all. But to build the solar, you have to go through this whole process. And if there's one thing that anyone listening to this can do, it would be like have a categorical exemption for solar deployment, or just like if I put money in escrow account that says after 20 years we have to pull this out, we'll pull all the solar out of the desert and it goes back to being desert, right? I will do that in a heartbeat. But if I have to hire another biologist for $10,000 to be like, well, on that 40-acre plot, we found a tuft of grass, which we believe might be a critical, one of the 20 species that this particular species of bee sometimes eats, and this species of bee is not technically in danger, but it might be at some point in the future. Therefore, you can't deploy there, even though it's zoned unrestricted industrial, and it's sandwiched between a rocket test stand and a chemical plant, for example, in an industrial part of the desert. I'm going to become the joker. It is insane.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this is bonkers. It is crazy town. The thing that drives me particularly crazy in Southern California is that just because solar is kind of new and off-grid solar is very new, unless you're very, very careful, you end up getting regulated as though you're trying to build a chemical plant. Though it's a solar ray, and the impact of solar array on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves soil moisture retention. If you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it, and that would pay for the process. But you end up having to go through more stringent environmental review process than if you just wanted to. Grade the whole thing and cover it in concrete. Or grade it and then park a bunch of old rusting cars that are dropping oil into the aquifer.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say you've got a bunch of private land out in the middle of nowhere, right? And you want to build it solar on it, you'll probably end up triggering NEPA. At which point you now have to do what is not in the law but considered necessary under current regulations, which is like your four-year environmental impact review, which generates so much paper that just the environmental impact of producing the report, because you have to cut down trees to make paper, is more than the environmental impact of just deploying the solar”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so in the United States, part of the reason that solar has not been deployed at massive scale yet is that a bunch of laws went into action in the early 1970s that were intended to protect our environment. And that makes a lot of sense. And our environment's a great thing we should protect.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. But electricity prices at this point are a reflection of a regulatory irrationality. It's the same situation in Europe and Australia for that matter. Your prices will rise until you've had enough. And you say, no, we demand that you allow us to take advantage of power technology that's been invented in the last 50 years. In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, Not sensitive to cost on power, but the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy. In the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to 1. The regulatory environment around solar is just insane. It's insane. The regulatory environment.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constantly. But no, in all seriousness, the central takeaway is that the hyperscalers are not power cost sensitive, they are power availability sensitive. And for all these things, you just run into this supply elasticity wall at the sort of rates of increase that we're talking about. And solar is by far...”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including installation and everything. But The panels of the magic part, they're the thing that turns sunlight into pure electrical energy at 25% efficiency. Everything else should be less than that. That's what we're. If you want to work on that project, come and work with us at Terraform because we're very cost sensitive.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't understand like Microsoft or Meta outbids Google or something for the last gas turbine that's available that year. Yeah, I mean, totally. The thing that I think Meta has realized is Zuck is running out of time to spend his money to win. The CapEx is not crazy high. Just to be clear, the Capex is still dominated by just the GPUs. So, like, how much does five gigawatts worth of GPUs cost?”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, basically, there's a balance here. So, this is not a very complicated optimization problem. For people who do optimization problems for fun, this is how you do it. You start off with a bunch of NRL data on what your solar abundance is in this particular part of the world, and then you just start throwing solar panels and batteries at it over the course of a one-year simulation until you hit the number of nines you want, right? And then to an extent you can trade the amount of panels and the amount of batteries you've got back and forth, and there's like a very, very broad optimum. Or you can throw in a third thing like a diesel backup or a gas turbine or whatever.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About 100,000 acres. Okay. Well, so the reason they, and it's still largely unpopulated now, because it's the national laboratory, but the reason they did that was they thought, oh, we're going to need four. Piles to produce plutonium. These are not nuclear reactors that produce exothermal energy. So you can't actually make nuclear power with them, but you're making plutonium with them. Then in the end, they needed two, I think, and they wanted them spaced out because they thought they might just spontaneously explode. And a bunch of other facilities and plants and stuff as well.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sounds like a lie. The amount of land put aside for Oak Ridge is 100,000 acres. The amount of land put aside for Hanford was about 100,000 acres.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One megawatt. That's just one megawatt. So 10 acres, one megawatt Situation at four nines. Yeah, so if you want five gigawatts and that's 5,000 entirely. Times 10 to 50,000 acres. And actually, at larger scale, you can probably cut those numbers down by 10, 20%. But on that order, and 50,000 acres sounds like a lot.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the sun came up every day and the day was the same length all the time, you would need four megawatts of solar rays, which is about four acres of land. But in practice, because you're owing for four nines instead of like one nine, you need an overbuild about two and a half X. So you've got about 10 acres of solar. So 10 acres of solar, six truckloads of batteries, one truckload of data center, and some cooling stuff.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source