On Energy and AI: We are all aware of the urgent need for massive new energy infrastructure for data centres and other general needs. The grid is old and the supply is constrained. Investor capital is pouring into nuclear soluations, new gas plants and other opportunities and the bottleneck will be better solved in 5 years+ However, the need for the extra energy is URGENT and IMMEDIATE... The AI race is the most important technology race that will ever occur. It is not just about hyperscalers and their profits, but about the game of nations. There is only one energy solution that can hyperscale in 12 to 24 months and that is solar. China has shown this by adding more than the total amount of energy created by Solar elsewhere globally, in one year. The rise of solar in China is one of the great exponentials. China knows the game here. Everyone else has to play catch up. The Kardashev Scale is the correct way to think about this. The sun is 99.9% of the mass of the solar system and we are harnessing <1% of its energy that hits earth. 1 sq mile on the earths surface receives 2.5 gigawatts of solar energy. Yes, solar panel efficiency is low and usable daylight hours is restricted but the amount of solar panels required in relative terms of the surface size is small. Solar is not yet perfect as the supply of energy is intermittant (nights/bad weather etc) and efficiency is low (but rising as tech improves) but costs are collapsing exponentially, even taking into account panel replacements and no subsidies (it doesnt require them). Some of the issues are offset by batteries which currently solve for 4 hours of extra storage. Tesla's Megapacks are growing at 50% to 70% per year and other players are also scaling fast. Battery tech will only imporve from here too. Just the use of solar + batteries reduces demand on the exisiting grid by upto 65% (you only need to use the grid load for perdiods of time). This helps massively in this rapid scaling to avoid an overload of the grid. Solar + batteries also allows for localised, decentralised energy grids for specifc use - factories, datacenters, etc. The load on the grid will be reduced after 2 years or so when new localised gas plants are built to balance the loads. Gas plants are the cheapest, cleanest and fastest of the fossil fuel solutions but it takes longer to scale than solar and requires a lot of gas pipelines. Weirdly, solar seems to be politicised, but its going to become an economic imperative as nothing else can solve the needs of the massive data centers in the next 1 to 2 years, and no one can afford to be leftr behind in the race to AGI and beyond. AI is the most important technology humanity will ever develop as it replaces us as the apex intelligence on earth and is vastly more energy efficient than humans at compute/intellgence output. The core metric for the universe itself is: Intelligence per unit of energy For this to scale exponentially, AI will replace humans as the primary source of intelligence and the sun's energy is most of the energy on earth. Even oil is just biologically-stored sun energy with finite supply. In terms of investability, there are two opportunities that stand out as long-term plays: The Solar ETF TAN is down 84% from its high, has formed a perfect base on both the log chart and the regular chart. TSLA is the other obvious play as it dominates the large battery sector and batteries account for 10% of total revenues and are growing rapidly and will continue to do so. The Tesla chart is one of the best in the Exponential Age. Anyway, I know because solar is politicised that people will rush to fight in the comments but don't bother unless you can solve the urgent energy needs for AI in the next 1 to 2 years by any other method.... you can't. And yes, dear troll, we all understand that there are lithium, copper and other needs, and yes, there will be an investible bull market in those too (amongst other major commodities) as the business cycle and the Capex cycle heats up... and yes, there will be supply issues if you havent carefully planned/hedged. But you need to warm up to solar... its going to get hot. (Time horizon is now and for the next 5 years+).(Raoul Pal)