Leaders from OpenAI, Microsoft, GE Vernova, PG&E, MP Materials, Ripple, Ember, Fervo and others joined Galvanize in Sausalito, California last week to tackle a central question: how to scale the physical and digital infrastructure that will define economic growth in the decades ahead.
From OpenAI’s call to treat electricity as a strategic asset to Microsoft’s roadmap for climate leadership in the AI age, the programming served as a demonstration that the transition economy is the growth economy. Moreover, that value creation will come from aligning the intelligence revolution with the electrification of everything.
“We don’t see climate and energy as sidecars to traditional investing,” said Galvanize Co-Founder Katie Hall. “They’re the lens through which long-term value becomes visible.”
The New Energy Order
Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist from think-tank Ember, set the macro context. His electrotech thesis described a world in which solar, wind, batteries, and electric mobility are no longer peripheral industries, they are the new industrial system – also intertwined with the defense industrial base through critical minerals, advanced materials, and power electronics for drones and other applications.
- Solar and wind now, on net, supply all global electricity-demand growth.
- Costs for small modular energy technologies fall about 20 percent with every doubling of capacity, meaning the opportunity gets bigger every year
- Half of the world has already seen peak fossil-fuel demand.
Bond distilled the drivers of the transition into three irresistible forces: physics, economics, and geopolitics, each now pushing in the same direction. “You cannot hold back the tide,” he said.
China, he argued, is the “pivot nation,” exporting and deploying the technologies powering this shift. The United States can still lead, but only if it treats electrotech as a question of competitiveness and security and enables its tech leaders to lead in energy as well.
Even so, he reminded the room that the transition will not be frictionless. “Change was never going to be easy,” Bond said. “But investors have seen this before. We’ve solved our barriers to change for decades…The ceiling is high, and rising,” he added.
AI and the Electrons Race
If Bond outlined the map, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, described the engine. “Electrons equal intelligence,” he told the audience, a phrase that captured how the capacity to generate clean electricity will determine national strength in the age of artificial intelligence.
Lehane’s remarks coincided with OpenAI and Microsoft’s announcement of a deeper collaboration to expand the energy systems underpinning AI, an acknowledgment that the limits of intelligence are now physical.
He also revealed that, on the eve of the Summit, he had submitted a memo to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy calling on the United States to treat electricity as a strategic asset. In that document, Lehane warned that America’s AI leadership depends on closing what he called the “electron gap” with China, which added 429 GW of new power capacity in 2024, compared to 51 GW in the U.S.
The memo proposed a national goal of building 100 GW of new capacity every year to meet baseline demand, replace retiring generation, and power the growth of AI. OpenAI’s internal analysis suggested that the first $1 trillion invested in AI-related infrastructure could increase U.S. GDP by roughly 5 percent over three years.
The message was clear: the AI economy now rests on the same physical foundations as any industrial era before it. Its limits—and its potential—depend on how quickly the country can expand and modernize its energy systems.
Climate Leadership in the Age of AI
Dr. Amy Luers, Microsoft’s Head of Sustainability Science and Innovation, expanded that argument beyond capacity to consequence. “AI is necessary for net zero,” she said, “but not a guarantee.”
Luers presented data showing that AI’s own footprint is modest, with data centers all up accounting for 0.5% of emissions today. And even at current growth rates, the IEA projects that a decade out data centers will account for less than 1 percent of global emissions. Meanwhile its potential impact is enormous. AI could enable reductions equal to 13 percent of the global emissions gap by 2035, even under conservative assumptions.
Her framework identified three ways AI can accelerate decarbonization:
- Predict and optimize complex systems — from grid performance to industrial efficiency.
- Accelerate discovery and development — for example, using AI to design battery materials that require less lithium.
- Boost workforce capacity — by streamlining permitting, infrastructure planning, and climate-data analysis.
Rapid data-center growth can strain local grids, she acknowledged, but this is an infrastructure issue, not a climate one. A key task is to align AI build-out with grid modernization and decarbonization.
“AI will be the biggest factor defining our climate future,” Luers said. “The question is whether we effectively deploy it to accelerate climate progress.”
The Utility Reimagined
Where Bond, Lehane, and Luers framed the global dynamics, Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E Corporation, focused on execution. Her message was disarmingly simple: “Load growth is good.”
For the first time in decades, electricity demand in California is rising, driven by EVs, electrified buildings, and AI data centers. Poppe argued that, if managed intelligently, new demand can lower rates by spreading fixed costs across more kilowatt-hours.
She offered a story from her team’s redesign of a Tesla super-charging site: engineers first projected a four-to-seven-year timeline; by using digital modeling and flexible load management, PG&E delivered 99 percent of the required power immediately, deferring only the peak-day constraint.
“We can build faster if we design smarter,” she said. “[Utilities are] the infrastructure that makes scale possible.”
Her broader point echoed throughout the Summit: utilities must be seen not as bottlenecks, but as partners in the buildout of the new economy.
Industrial Policy in Action
That build-out is already visible. Ryan Corbett, CFO of MP Materials (a Galvanize Global Equities portfolio company), described how his company has become the only fully integrated mine-to-magnet operation in the United States, a linchpin for electric vehicles, wind turbines, and national defense.
From its rare-earth mine in California’s Mojave Desert to its new magnet manufacturing facility outside Dallas–Fort Worth, MP is rebuilding an industrial chain that had disappeared from the U.S. for more than two decades. Corbett noted that the company’s expansion is not a speculative bet but a matter of national security: the U.S. currently relies on China for roughly 95 percent of the magnets essential to electric drivetrains, grid components, and precision defense technologies.
To address that vulnerability, MP signed a landmark Department of War partnership earlier this year, combining capital investment, price floors, and long-term offtake agreements to guarantee domestic supply. The partnership effectively rewrites the playbook for American industrial policy, pairing public-sector certainty with private-sector execution.
“We’re not asking to be subsidized,” Corbett said. “We’re building to be competitive at scale.”
The logic is spreading beyond magnets. Across sectors, from transformers and transmission lines to semiconductors and data-center infrastructure, the same formula is emerging: long-duration investment in physical capacity, aligned with strategic national goals.
In the day’s closing conversation, Chris Larsen, Executive Chairman of Ripple, tied the economic and political threads together. He argued that affordability, competitiveness, and credibility will determine who wins the transition.
“The next Big Short,” Larsen predicted, “will be on climate risk that hasn’t yet been priced in.”
As energy, finance, and technology converge, he said, the signal of the new economy will be visible in rates, jobs, and insurance bills.
“When people open their insurance bills,” Larsen said, “that’s the climate crisis hitting their wallet.”
Together, Corbett and Larsen articulated two sides of the same thesis: industrial renewal and economic realism. The transition is an operating system being built, financed, and defended in real time.
The Builders’ Decade
The conversations at the Solutions Summit revealed an economy in transition, from intention to implementation, and from policy to project finance. What connects each of these discussions — solar deployment, AI infrastructure, grid modernization, magnet manufacturing — is the same principle: execution creates value.
The next era of economic growth will be built on connecting capital, technology, and infrastructure at scale. At Galvanize, we see this convergence every day across our investment platforms. The opportunity ahead is to compete by building, financing, and operating the infrastructure of a low-carbon, high-growth economy.
This piece is the first in a series. In the weeks ahead, we’ll share three deeper-dive recaps from the Galvanize Summit, unpacking what’s next for global energy, how AI is reshaping climate leadership, and what execution at scale looks like across capital and industry.