Paris Looks to the Future of AI, DOGE Sniffs Out Treasury 'Irregularities'
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From the heart of where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond, this is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow. Live from New York, I'm Caroline Hyde.

I'm Jackie Davalos in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up, government and tech leaders descend on Paris for the AI summit as French President Macron touts the country's very own Stargate. Plus, President Trump says Elon Musk's Doge may have found, quote, irregularities at the Treasury Department. And China's BYD is putting driver assistance features into most of its cars for free and plans to integrate software from Deetsy. But first, let's check in on the markets. And actually, the Nasdaq...

pushes higher, but Tesla is one of the points contributed to the downside. We'll dig into what BYD means for Tesla competition in China. We're up 1.3%. Nvidia lending its power to the points that move to the higher side. We'll dig into the AI track that drives Nvidia higher, but move on to a key stock you've got to watch.

because it's a record high and is up 16 for 16 straight days if we see meta managed to hold on to these rather small games on today jackie it would be 16 straight days of gains and a lot of it is fueled by ai exuberance for meta sweet 16 we move on to what's happening over in paris where it's all about ai of course the summit is now underway bringing together almost 100

countries and over a thousand private sector and civil society representatives, including Prime Minister of India. We've also got Sam Altman of OpenAI. And this as France is set to announce a total of $113 billion in investments in AI projects in the country. Bloomberg's Tom McKenzie is standing by. And rather akin to Stargate here in the United States, it's about private sector commitments over in France, Tom.

It is. And if a fire had not been lit under the feet of policymakers in Europe prior to DeepSeek, prior to Stargate, then it certainly has been in recent weeks. And this is Macron's response. The president expects to take the stage behind me shortly. Currently, you've got Sunder Pacho, the CEO, of course, of Alphabet, speaking. The commitment from Macron, as you say, around 109 billion euros, 113 billion US dollars, is in part an answer to Stargate. It is also in part an answer to the innovation now coming.

out of China, and it's an attempt by France and Europe to position itself to close the gap. Macron's been quite clear about this. This is catch-up now for Europe, and his line yesterday in an interview for a French newspaper saying, we need to invest, invest, invest. Along with that US$113 billion, by the way, you also have General Catalyst driving

plans for about 150 billion US dollars that they say they could put to play in France, in Europe, alongside the likes of Mistral and Spotify and other investors to drive and build out infrastructure to layer as well on top of the industrial sector of Europe. That's where they think the opportunity is. But of course, key questions around implementation, key questions about regulation, key questions about whether or not we have the data, the chips and the talent to really compete versus the US and China.

Tom, this is a huge, ambitious effort on behalf of the Europeans, but I'm curious because they've usually also been those to be at the forefront of regulation, something that private companies and some investors don't really love. Have you gotten any sense from the executives you've spoken to about how that balance is playing out right now there?

That is very much a live debate. To what extent Europe should regulate when it comes to AI. The EU AI Act, it is going to start to take hold this year. It will be largely fully implemented by 2026. So that is already, the door is already open. The horse has already bolted on that front. To what extent they can tweak the regulation going forward is a question mark. But clearly the divide now between Europe's approach and the US approach with President Trump ripping up AI regulation is stark.

Some would say that having the guard rails in place in Europe is at least beneficial. At least there is the guard rails in place, at least there is a track to follow. You do, of course, have a disparate

landscape in the US, state by state. That potentially could pose problems for US AI companies trying to navigate the state by state regulation. The other question, of course, is to what extent Europe can leverage its talent that it's got here. And it does have software engineering talent, the energy as well. France is a big producer of nuclear energy. That's a benefit. We do not have semiconductors. We do not have companies like Huawei in China or Nvidia in the US. So that remains a challenge.

But they're hoping that at the end of this summit, they come through with a proposal that can meet some of the challenges and really get to grips on the implementation of this. That's Bloomberg's Tom McKenzie. Thank you. Here's something that came out of one of Tom's interviews at the Paris AI Summit earlier today. The head of Google's DeepMind, Demis Hassab, is questioning the notion that China's DeepSeek actually spent less than $6 million to develop its AI system.

"First thing to say is it's a very impressive model, very impressive piece of work. I think the team is probably the best team that I've seen come out of China. So that said, I think a lot of the claims are exaggerated and a little bit misleading."

Let's bring in RBC Capital Markets Internet Analyst, Brad Erickson, for more on the AI landscape, on the race, so-called race between US and China. And Brad, when you hear of DeepSeek, it seems as though people are questioning the overall amount. Therefore, do you like Amazon committing to $100 billion, to Microsoft more than 80, and similar coming out of Meta, for example?

Yeah, I think for the moment they have the revenue growth to support those investments. I think people are right to question the long-term return on invested capital equation there, which is really where the debate has shifted. But I think for the moment...

Again, we're in this moment where we don't know how big this technology can become. And so I think, you know, we lean on those statements such as the risk of underinvestment is far greater than the risk of overinvestment. I do think that's kind of the prudent way for these companies to be treating this for the time being.

And look, investors have thus far given them a pass. Look at Metashare's extraordinary 16-day run to the higher side. Many would say that the open source commitment from Meta has been speaking to their large language model operation, the commitment to leaning into AI, even as, of course, they're announcing who's going to be hit by the job cuts today. Just talk to us about some of the thesis around Meta outperforming the other big tech players here. Yeah, 16-game hitting streak is pretty impressive.

I would say Meta has kind of the two key things going for it right now. One, they have arguably the greatest amount of revenue coverage is what we call it. So again, just when you look at the marginal revenues they're adding, they just did $27 billion year over year in 2024. That's plenty of extra revenue dollars to cover the depreciation that's coming into the model from the CapEx spend. So that's the first part. The second part is they just have a heck of a great narrative

on all the ways that AI could affect their products both now and in the future. And so I think the market is, what the market's telling you right now is they really believe in Meta's strategy and really AI giving it the most torque to the upside in the future for this model.

Brad, I want to talk about open source technology now that we're on the topic of meta, because in your note, you actually highlight startups' desire to want to build more end-specific applications on top of already existing AI. And I'm curious how that shift is better for investors. Are open source companies better positioned than closed source companies like OpenAI, for example?

You know, I think there's a debate as to whether the closed source guys actually do decide to open things up because it could to the improvement of their models or the improvement of their distribution over time. Clearly, you know, Meta's open source strategy, I don't want to call it a wolf in sheep's clothing, but there is an aspect where they're looking to leverage sort of developer intel of the world to be able to then potentially pull in those innovations in the model.

and then use them for internal purposes, which would never see the light of day. And that benefits their products longer term. So I do think that's definitely a part of their strategy. And frankly, that's really smart from our perspective. So that's, I think, at this point, I think that's how they are leveraging open source so well. And again, like I said earlier, the market is really buying into that thesis right now.

One of the other things that we're looking closely at today is, of course, the Paris AI Summit. And we've had a few of these summits over the last couple of years, ever since Chad GPT hit the scene. But I'm curious, as an investor, if anything that comes out of that really affects your long-term thesis, because we are talking about big sums of money being poured into this space now from the Europeans.

Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of funny how this is following the history of tech, right? U.S. innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates is kind of the famous saying there. Yeah, I mean, certainly from a sovereign AI perspective, I think countries recognize there's a huge opportunity to modernize and make better use of the treasure troves of data they all have.

On the flip side, of course, there's a civil society impact here. What does it do to jobs? Does it make people more productive or does it just straight up take jobs from and remove or dislocate industries in an adverse way for macro economies? Those are giant questions that are certainly being discussed there. But I think from this point, our perspective, our seat, where we're covering these issues

internet names, they're making all the investments to push the industry and frankly the world

forward with this innovation, we have to be behind that at this point. And you get the infiltration across not only the large language model makers, but those that adopt generative AI. Just think of Pinterest numbers last week and how generative AI is fed into that story. We get the news today from other sources that Lyft is going to be eyeing robo-taxis as soon as 2026. Where are the level of internet names that we haven't yet factored in where gen AI is going to really be reaching forward in terms of their earnings and revenues?

Yeah, I think, you know, certainly autonomous vehicles, you hear about particularly around synthetic data. So that's being able to take, for instance, real world miles and then model them out into other situations that you couldn't possibly capture in testing people driving around, you know, accidents that could come up just as an example. So that obviously benefits, we think, the ride hailing names. And there's going to be others. You mentioned digital ads is kind of one of the best examples.

sectors where you can apply AI. Web design is another sector we've mentioned. So that's companies like Wix and GoDaddy. Those companies are making it easier than ever to go out and start a small business, build a website, and grow off of that. So those are some of the ones in our coverage we like.

Brad, we had some big tariff news coming out of Washington today. How does that weigh into how you're looking at tech names going forward, especially given all this talk about AI infrastructure, which will require perhaps some of these critical materials? Yeah, I mean, I think we'll reserve judgment on what the ultimate outcomes of those are, given what we've seen over the past few weeks. But

I think the impact would align with what the macro impact would be, which is if you raise costs, certainly that's probably not going to be a good thing for these companies that are building out, certainly Meta, Amazon and Google being the three kind of biggest bricklayers in this industry.

RBC Capital Markets internet analyst Brad Ericsson. Great to get some time with you. Thanks. Coming up, Doge may have found irregularities in the Treasury Department. That's according to President Trump. More on that next. This is Bloomberg Technology.

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And that could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent. Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought of. Think of that.

That was President Trump speaking in Air Force One ahead of yesterday's Super Bowl attendance, saying Elon Musk's doge may have found irregularities at the Treasury Department. For more, Bloomberg's Mike Shepard joins us now. Mike, what do we know about what exactly Trump was referring to and what the potential implications could be on the Treasury market?

Well, this is one of the great mysteries that emerged from that Air Force One conversation with reporters. He raised the prospect of irregularities somewhere in the Treasury Department, but offered no specifics, nor have we heard from the cost-cutting team over at Treasury Now that's being led by

by Doge, by executives from this U.S. digital service that Doge is working with. We don't know what they're referring to. Is it government contracts? Is it excessive spending within the Treasury Department on certain contracts? And we don't know even whether it refers to the

Treasury's market itself, the way the president was discussing in that moment. We do know that Scott Besant, the Treasury secretary, sought during his interview with our colleague, Salaya Mohsen, to offer reassurances that everything would be normal operationally at Treasury, despite whatever Doge might be doing.

And how much Doge can do when, well, judges weigh in and try and halt some of the activity is a question mark, Mike. So too is, well, laying bare some of the operations of other units. I'm thinking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seems to be now skeletal too.

Well, that's right, Carol, and that is one of the latest targets of this cost-cutting initiative sweeping through the government. Doge is going really agency by agency. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was the latest target over the weekend. Essentially, they have shuttered operations. Employees have been told not to come into the office.

And, of course, this does coincide with Elon Musk's own efforts to turn X into a one, you know, platform for all different types of services, not just social media and communication, but also turn it into a place where you could do transactions financially. Now, the Doge team over at CFPB has gotten access to some sensitive data, our reporting has shown, including bank examination records and other data.

information that is closely guarded, that's very sensitive. Of course, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does scrutinize banks and other financial services companies for the way that they interact and intersect with consumers.

And this agency exists, as its name would suggest, to protect consumers. There are other financial regulators, but this is the one that is really geared to look out for the average American. And it has returned since its inception in 2011 roughly $21 billion in improper payments or improper charges back to consumers from these institutions.

Bloomberg's Mike Sheppard, thanks for all of that. Meanwhile, Doge gaining a key ally, we understand, at the US Treasury with veteran tech employee Tom Krause, who has been appointed a special government employee and will serve as fiscal assistant secretary at the Treasury. But he's also the CEO of Cloud Software Group, which saw...

deep cost cuts at Citrix Systems. For more, Bloomberg's Jordan Robertson. And it is such a deep dive that you do with colleagues here, Jordan. Just talk us through who Tom Krause is and why we're worried about the deep cuts he's done in the private sector. Yeah, thanks for having me. So we're learning more information about Tom Krause, you know, the Doge pick, Elon Musk's Doge pick at Treasury.

As you mentioned, he currently holds two jobs, one at Treasury and one as CEO of Cloud Software Group. Cloud Software Group was formerly known as Citrix Systems. That company got acquired for $16.5 billion in a private equity leveraged buyout in 2022.

And what we've done is we've taken a look at a series of pretty significant cost cuts that Krause enacted at Cloud Software Group over the last two, two and a half years. And in particular, the impact of those cuts on the security of Citrix products.

There's a family of Citrix products called Netscaler, these are security appliances that have been at the center of a number of major hacks in recent years. And what we looked at was to try to quantify the level and the extent of the cuts to the security department at Citrix.

and any impact to the security of those appliances. And what we found was that the cuts were very deep indeed across the company, including the security department, and that this in fact may be why Krauss was selected by Musk's doge for this Treasury role. His background is cost-cutting. His background is also, according to sources we've spoken with, running incredibly profitable companies. This is his specialty.

Jordan, your reporting raises an important question about employing private equity tactics, this cost-cutting that you're talking about, in sensitive sectors. So now kind of take that into the government in Washington, where Kraus now has more influence. What has the agency said, the Treasury Department, as well as maybe even the company he's still employed by, which I found super surprising?

Yeah, the Treasury Department says things are operating normally while the Doge team kind of conducts its work. Over the weekend, Krause and other Doge staffers were temporarily stopped from accessing data and using the data. However, what the reporting finds is that this is a strategy, a very time-honored strategy among private equity companies to kind of load up companies with debt, buy them with lots of debt,

You have to then cut lots of costs in order to repay that debt. And in terms of the potential impact on the federal government, it really depends who you talk to. We've spoken to folks, and we've included their commentary in our story, that think that ultimately Krause could be really a positive thing for the government in terms of really aggressively slashing expenses and finding ways to be more efficient. We've also spoken to other industry experts, security experts, government experts who

who say that applying a private equity approach to government could potentially have very, very serious and very unexpected consequences, especially when you're talking about cutting not just thousands of employees that were cut at Citrix, but potentially tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or more. That's Bloomberg's Jordan Robinson. Thanks for joining us.

Tesla challenger BYD plans to integrate software from DeepSeek and is also offering new driver assistance features in almost all future models at no additional cost to buyers. Let's bring in Bloomberg's Craig Trudell for more. Craig, before we get into some of these new features, what do we know about how BYD is incorporating this new DeepSeek technology?

Yeah, it's still a little bit unclear how exactly this is going to work, but there is some support here. And I think the combination of two names that, you know, it's hard to kind of think of two that are any bigger in the tech and auto spaces. I mean, DeepSeek very much has sort of come lately name, whereas BYD, I feel like has been, you know, the last few years, just the sort of talk of the auto industry in terms of how quickly they've grown and, you know, just how big...

of ambitions they have and you know the one knock that they've they've maybe had against them is they don't necessarily bring a ton of of you know driver assistance technology to the table they're trying to address that and also do so in a way that you know is very sort of consistent with what their approach has been just to the industry in general which is you know really aggressive pricing

really aggressive ramp up in its shares recently. We're just showing a chart, it's up more than 20% over the last four trading days, Craig. So what is it about this cheaper autonomous option that is just leaving competitors for dust? It must be a big pressure for Tesla.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a big part of it. When you sort of measure BYD up against a Tesla or some of the EV startups in China that have really kind of leaned into driver assistance technology, BYD hasn't really had as much to offer there. And so there's been a sort of a knock against the BYD offerings that, well, if you're going to have to kind of settle, right, you're not going to be able to have this sort of

latest and greatest in lane keeping or what have you. And so I think there was a real sort of opportunity for BYD to kind of address that in a more aggressive way. And, you know, you mentioned the run up in the stock. All it took was a sort of, you know, invite of an event. And it was sort of reminiscent of how, you know, Tesla over the years has been able to get investors really excited just by, you know, setting a date on the calendar for a big product event that they, you know, they have something to share.

Bloomberg's Craig Trudeau. Thanks so much. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Jackie Davalos in San Francisco. Quick check on these markets, Jackie, because, look, we've managed to shake off the latest geopolitical angst. Those tariffs coming on aluminium and steel coming from President Trump not managing to curtail some of the money on that we're seeing in the NASDAQ 100. We're up one and a quarter percent. What leads us on a points perspective?

It's Nvidia. We're managing to claw back some of that sell-off from DeepSeek. We're about halfway there. It gains another 2.8% on the day, the biggest points contributed to the upside. Maybe feed across from what's happening in TSMC and Honhai in particular. TSMC, even despite that earthquake knock to production, standing by their forecast for the first quarter and the full year and permitting to AI investment. That, of course, helps the like signals for Nvidia. So too does Honhai at ServerMaker, also showing upside.

resiliency there. So all about AI today and more on how indeed companies and governments are approaching AI safely. Let's go back to Paris. Bloomberg's Tom McKenzie standing by with the CEO of German startup, Aleph Alpha.

Caroline, yes, thank you. Very pleased to say I'm joined by the CEO and the founder of Aleph Alpha, one of the leading AI startups, of course, in Europe, coming out of Germany with a focus on sovereignty and on enterprise. Jonas, start with DeepSeek, because I've heard from some in this room that it's a Sputnik moment, echoing what we heard from, of course, Andreessen Horowitz, and others saying it's a flash in the pan. Where do you stand on DeepSeek?

Well, first of all, it's basically a continuation of what we've been seeing for years. These models get better, they get more efficient, open source is developing. So it's basically a confirmation of what we've been positioning ourselves for for years. So for us, it's a victory lap. For our customers, it's a victory lap. A more incremental than sputnik moment. Well, yes. But I mean, of course, it's a sputnik moment also because China is maybe...

in some regions ahead of the US for the very first time. So that's certainly that. You're offering it to your clients now. Have you tested it? Are you data secure on this? What does the response be? Yeah, I mean, our strategy is to include open source model, right? So we've been doing this with Lama, we've been doing this with other great models, and we've been doing this with DeepSeek. And so our customers are large enterprises and governments. So any transformation you're doing for these customers takes years and years. So

What is today the very best model is almost irrelevant. They just need a partner that can guarantee that they can leverage the best of open source together with innovation they need for their own business. You've told me in the past you think large language models will end up being commoditized and essentially price will drop to zero.

And yet, on the stage behind us, Macron, the president of France, is going to get up and announce €109 billion of investment to kind of match Stargate in the US. Is that funding misspent, both in the US and Europe? Is this misaligned?

So we need funding. We need funding for our companies, we need funding for infrastructure, but what I worry is that we are getting distracted and putting too much focus on infrastructure. Infrastructure is not going to save us. Infrastructure investment alone will not solve digital sovereignty. What we need is value creation. We need innovation, and then the infrastructure comes almost automatically as a second-order effect.

You pivoted from building out large language models to building out generalized AI operating systems. Very much focused on the enterprise. I know you're going to push back on the word pivot here. What has the response been? As you reflect back on that, was that the right decision? How are your investors feeling about that?

So DeepSeek for our investors, they were having a party, right? Because this is precisely what we've been positioning ourselves for. We can solve the general purpose task like writing a poem for your mother's birthday or like email replies. Our customers can solve that with the best of the best of open source models, but we

But one thing all our customers have in common is that the things that are really valuable, they care about, like compliance workflows, government workflows, manufacturing, requirements engineering, all these open source models can't do it. So we are adding our own innovation to solve that, and everybody's winning. What's that doing for revenues at Alpha Alpha? What do they come in at in 2024? What's your target for this year?

So I'm not going to tell you my target, but I'm going to tell you that we just recently signed a 19 million contract with the German labor agency, work agency, employment agency. So these are the kind of contracts we're currently signing. And I think that is numbers worth getting out of bed for. You're a German startup. Elon Musk is meddling, some would say, in German politics. What lessons do you take from that? Elon Musk supporting the AFD in Germany, a right-wing party.

I mean, to be fair, we've been meddling in U.S. elections as well, right? So it's like a... How do you know? Well, I mean...

Some German politicians have been very vocal about their preference. Nothing like this, come on, Jonas. Does it underscore your desire to have sovereign AI? You have a tech mogul interfering in German politics. I don't like it, but I think there's nothing really we can do about it right now. The US are still our partners, are still our friends, and we need to find a solution together with the democratic countries, together with our partners.

OpenAI were talking to me earlier and they said the two leaders in AI are the US and the CCP, the Communist Party of China. Do you agree? Does Europe have skin in the game here, really?

So that's probably correct, but this is not a zero-sum game. This is not about who's the first and everyone else is empty-handed, right? At Davos, just two weeks ago, we launched for the... We're the first team that launched an evolution of the transformer architecture. And I talked to several research labs, leading research labs, U.S. researchers that are now starting to look at that. So it's with all likelihood the next...

architecture, the next evolution of the transformer is coming out of Europe. Do we need to be worried that we can't access and we can't build out our own semiconductors? Not only do you have Nvidia and AMD in the US, but you also have Amazon and Microsoft developing their own semiconductors around artificial intelligence. Is that a gap that we need to close and how do we do it? Well, that's a painful gap certainly, right? Also the fact when you look at the CapEx, the hyperscalers have assembled

That's almost impossible to kind of reach the same levels. And it's equally unlikely that we'll build a competitor to AMD or Nvidia, basically, with a snip of a finger. So that's painful, but it's a reality we have to accept. And I think every money that is directed against...

Building a competitor to these juggernauts is wasted money. Okay, Jonas, thank you very much indeed. Always a pleasure to speak to you. Jonas Androulis, of course, the CEO and co-founder of Aleph Alpha, speaking to me here at the Grand Palais, just ahead of Macron's speech, the president, of course, of France. Guys, back to you. Tom McKenzie, thanks so much.

It's time now for Talking Tech. First up, DeepSeek is ramping up hiring recruiting specialists for artificial general intelligence roles, data experts, researchers and a legal chief. All this really signalling that the Chinese AI start-up is ready to expand ambitions after it stunned markets with a cheaper model that was on par with open AIs.

Plus, Apple gets a mandate from the UK. The government has ordered Apple to build a backdoor to access global user data. It's a move that could spark one of the biggest privacy battles for the iPhone maker. In an undisclosed order in January, British authorities asked Apple to circumvent encryption used to secure user data in its cloud service.

And Rivian announced that it will begin selling its EV trucks that were designed for Amazon to other customers. This is an effort to boost revenue as consumer demand for EV cars actually slows. The commercial vehicles can be purchased by fleets for any size, with deliveries slated to begin in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, we're watching shares of Lyft. Interesting reports coming. We're up some 3%. Could robo-taxis be offered by Lyft as soon as 2026? That's a report coming from TechCrunch and from an executive inside Lyft, Jackie. Coming up, Joseph Mike from the Center for Strategic and International Studies joins us to talk about how energy demand could impact AI growth. This is Bloomberg. ♪

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Nokia will replace its CEO with Intel's recently appointed head of AI, Justin Hurtad. The surprise announcement comes as Nokia, the network equipment maker, works to exit a prolonged slump in orders from phone operators. Now, the incoming CEO joined Bloomberg Television earlier today. Just take a listen.

My focus coming in, though, is going to be to spend time with all of our major stakeholders, and one of those will be our customers, and particularly our Telco customer base, to understand how we're serving them well and what we can do to continue to serve them better and drive growth. The way I think about it is we have a strong and broad portfolio today, some of which we

which is being touched by AI today. But I have also, the way I think about the AI cycle is it will be a super cycle. And much like we saw with the internet, it spawned the mobile internet, it spawned cloud. I believe we'll see that same thing with AI and

As the AI summit is underway in Paris, let's also consider the future of AI safety regulations here in the U.S. under Trump. This just as a top official at the U.S. AI Safety Institute steps down. Let's bring in Bloomberg's Shireen Ghaffari for more. Shireen, talk us through what this agency was doing and how this departure potentially puts that progress at risk.

Yeah, so the US AI Safety Institute is relatively new, right? A little over a year old. And its mandate was to sort of try to convene some standards around what AI companies are going to be, how they're going to be testing their AI models to make sure that they're safe and also to test their capabilities. Now that Elizabeth Kelly, the head of that institute, has stepped down and there's no replacement announced, it's a little bit unclear what the future of this institute will look like.

Just at the time that world leaders, indeed leaders of companies, gather to talk about the future of AI, of any sort of guardrail that Europe can agree with the United States, it's a pretty pivotal moment, it feels like. J.D. Vance is going to be speaking on it.

That's right. So we have, you know, the U.S. vice president planning to have a presence at this summit. But again, you sort of, in order to kind of get all these companies together to give access to their models, to test them, to see how safe each release is, you sort of need, I mean, I guess the argument for the USA Safety Institute is that they said that we need companies

some entity to sort of actually be in the weeds doing this work. And so who will be the leader of this institute, what their priorities will be, what kind of safety evaluations they will run is critical beyond the kind of executive level that we see J.D. Vance taking leadership on. Well said, Shireen Ghaffari. Great reporting as ever. Thank you. Meanwhile, as governments and companies around the world, as we say, announce plans to build or expand AI infrastructure, another question is being raised. How are they going to power it all?

Joseph Mikett is with us. He's the Director of Energy Security and Climate Change over at the Center of Strategic and International Studies. And look, it's so interesting in this moment that France is going to be committing, we understand, to a gigawatt of nuclear energy for this AI exuberant moment. You've got leaders of Microsoft, or indeed Andy Jassy just last week, saying it's all about energy that stops us building out data centers, Joseph. What are we not getting about energy needs here?

Well, a data center is nothing more than a bunch of chips and racks that will take models, data, use algorithms to cook together intelligence, answer questions, help people perform economically productive activities.

Energy is the flame that powers that process, electricity in particular. And when we look at what the leading hyperscalers and companies want to build, these are immediately going to be some of the largest electricity loads in the United States and probably the largest class of new generation capacity adding over the next five to 10 years.

Joseph, there is a real question about just how much the electricity grid can actually withstand. What do we know about what buy-in we need at the local level? Because a lot of these plans are coming from the federal level, and it's not clear to me that do they actually need more permission or perhaps collaboration with municipalities, states?

So it's important to think about the size of the challenge. We need to even to hit sort of medium level forecast for how much data center energy we're going to need over the next five years. We need to build more generation capacity over that next five years than we added over the last 20. It's just a muscle memory that in the United States we don't really have.

And that involves everyone from the state and local permitting committees, from local utilities. And there is a role for the federal government in providing some backstops, some funding, perhaps some permitting reform help so that we can get the speed or we can get power to these data centers with enough speed. The reality is we don't just have a bunch of gigawatt power plants lying around that are ready to plug data centers into.

So give Marks out of 10 to the current administration. Apologies, Jackie, entirely my fault. Give Marks out of 10 for the current administration. I think we need to see some more texture around what the current administration wants to do. President Trump has said we are going to open up all the brakes in terms of permitting. We're going to look even to coal plants to rebuild these kinds of things.

I think what's really important is what's going to match what the hyperscalers and the companies want to do and what matches what's going on in the power sector now. When we look at what we expect to see over the next few years, the real additions are going to be solar, maybe some wind, batteries, natural gas. I think the administration is in a position to help some of that proceed. Then we need to look at long-term growth.

because this isn't a problem that ends in 2030 when the first few mega-sized data centers come online. If this is truly the economic revolution that the companies are investing toward, we need to have a much more ready system for further growth in the 2030s. And there, I think we want to see the administration move toward nuclear power. We need to see investments in modernizing our grid. Those are going to be the key things for long-term progress in the United States.

Joseph, where does this leave climate goals? Because when I hear coal-powered plants, it seems like it's actually taking a step back. And as you mentioned, hyperscalers are involved. What are they going to be amenable to, especially because they have net zero goals themselves? You look at climate security. This is not just a story about the environment, but it's one that has to do with national security. Talk to us about where it leaves these goals.

Of course, there's a lot of considerations that we need to think about, especially as the government gets involved trying to support these mega projects. I suspect that we're not going to see new coal plants built in the United States to power data centers. Instead, we want to see those hyperscalers want to see investments in clean energy. One of the things that is most helpful in that regard

is that they're pretty deep-pocketed. And they need to spend to build power quickly, but they also want to spend and can make investments in the novel technologies that will allow us to grow this stuff over time. That could be small modular reactors. We've already seen them restarting large nuclear reactors here in the United States. And so the reality of the system today is the more we build, the easier we make it to build, the cleaner and cleaner I think this process is going to be for us.

What's the breakdown of what that share can look like? Because we've heard about nuclear energy kind of for a long time, and I would like to kind of get a better sense of what the horizon actually looks like. Is it a five-year or ten-year kind of initiative?

We move really, really fast. I think we can make both grid upgrades and nuclear power a part of this solution set early in the 2030s. But a lot of that stuff is still a little bit far from commercialization. It'll take us time to get there.

Over the next few years, I don't expect to see much difference in the capacity that's added from what's been added historically. The U.S. builds a lot of solar. The U.S. has large natural gas resources. And the investments we are seeing over the last year and the things we expect to see over the next couple of years are going to combine those two sources principally with some battery storage and some investments in green energy and other places to manage both the emergent power need

The need for stability, you want to run these facilities basically all the time once you've made such a large investment in the underlying chips and data. And then dealing with the climate effects by making investments in renewables and other things. That's Joseph Miket from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks for joining us.

Just take a look at shares of T-Mobile right now. The stock, as you'll see, is up today. The telecom provider has officially launched its service with Elon Musk's Starlink network. It's offering customers texting and data usage completely off the grid at the low promotional price of $0. It's free for now. The offer is open to anyone for a limited time, with the service eventually costing $15 a month. T-Mobile announced the program on Sunday with an ad debut during the Super Bowl, Jackie.

For more on the Super Bowl and how the NFL is dominating entertainment, Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw joins us now. Lucas, viewership of almost everything on TV has plummeted, but somehow the NFL's has just gotten bigger. Help us understand this resilience because it's not every day that we're all tuning into a nail biter like last night. Oh, yeah, that was not the game that the NFL wanted. You know,

Part of it is just live in sports, right? You look at the television business and as the ratings for scripted shows has gone down, you know, sports has stayed pretty resilient, whether that's football, baseball, basketball. Football has been much stronger and gotten much bigger than basketball and baseball. I think part of it is that there are

so few games, this idea of scarcity, right? So every game in the football season matters in the way that whatever NBA games are happening this week don't really. And then, I don't know, the product is just really good. You know, there was a moment six to eight years ago where the NFL looked like it was a little shaky. The ratings were going down. There were a lot of different reasons for that, and it has fully rebounded.

So interesting in those times that maybe we were questioning ESPN head at the time, John Skipper, you write in your newsletter, was actually trying to persuade Bob Iger to get out of the NFL, go bigger on other sports. But good thing Bob Iger ignored him. And a lot of it is about content and about knowing the people. It's almost like you're following some sort of real life celebrity culture here.

Yeah, I mean, I thought that was a really interesting story that John Skipper told me. He was the head of ESPN for a long time, really brilliant executive. And he had the same feeling, I think, that I did several years ago, which was he saw all the bad news around concussions and thought, OK, this sport is unsafe. It's going to be on the decline. Turns out most Americans do not care.

And to your point about celebrity, they're way more interested in Patrick Mahomes or in the Taylor Swift of it all. I mean, a couple of the emails I got from readers last night were that I did not give Taylor Swift enough credit for the current popularity of the NFL. And sadly, she probably wasn't that exuberant after last night. More love being shown for the halftime performances as well. But they made some big bets on when to play shows, right? Like Christmas Day, for example.

Yeah, I mean, look, the NFL has gradually expanded its control over the schedule. It used to be that the NFL was primarily a Sunday product and then there was Monday night football. They added Thursday night football, which is now on Amazon. I think they're very happy with that because Amazon helps them reach

More viewers get into streaming and they can also prime Amazon to maybe bid on some international rights that they'll sell down the line. They've started to have more games on Saturday. I think there's an expectation that eventually, because they're playing games in other markets, that they might create sort of a new window early Sunday morning. And that's the type of thing that they might shop to a Netflix. So yeah, NFL is now five months long.

Lucas Shaw, all over NFL this weekend, even if you're not watching it that much yourself. What does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology? Don't forget to check out our podcast. You can find it on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. This is Bloomberg Technology. Feeling buried in a never-ending to-do list that comes with running a business, managing orders, tracking expenses? It's a lot.

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