Emerald AI founder and CEO @vsiv to @AmyAHarder on the 3 recent inflection points in AI and energy: 1. Demand for compute has intensified 2. Energy has become a bottleneck 3. The political backlash against data centers has accelerated #AxiosHouse#

Emerald AI founder @vsiv warns why moving AI data centers off-grid could be a "horrible outcome" for everyone: "A horrible outcome is the data centers say: I can't deal with all this regulation. I'm gonna go build my own data center off in the desert somewhere and be completely islanded from the public power grid. That is gonna deprive utilities and communities from anchor revenue for decades." "It's gonna raise costs for communities indirectly because all of the power equipment, the natural gas turbines and the power switchgear that they buy for the islanded data center is gonna raise prices for the public power system." "And ultimately, the data centers won't want it either because it'll raise the cost per token of artificial intelligence, because it's really expensive to operate your own private utility." @EmeraldAi_

Emerald AI founder @vsiv warns America can't compete with China on AI without fixing its power gap: "If we don't do this, there is no chance that you compete with China on AI. China built 500 gigawatts of power capacity last year. 10x what America built." "China will have more than three times all of the data centers in the world power consumption available as spare peak capacity in 2030." "Meanwhile, America already has a deficit, and that deficit's gonna grow between what we want to build, 70 gigawatts of data centers by 2028, and what we can connect to the grid, 30 gigawatts." "That's why it's so important that we unlock that 100 that's available right now, even as we continue to build out our power and grid infrastructure." @EmeraldAi_

If you’re a bootstrapped / lightly-funded AI founder with a product that gets more than 500 new signups per day, DM me. I have something for you. Please don’t DM if you have less than 500 signups per day.

Bruce (@brutoshi_ ) is speaking at Money Frontier 2026. Bruce is the founder of OpenClaw Asia @OpenClaw_ASIA . He leads OpenClaw Asia, an independent community initiative advancing open source AI Agents and real-world agent adoption across Asia. He has organized AI Agent programs connecting builders across Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Macao, including ClawCon Macao at BEYOND Expo, which brought together 400+ AI practitioners, developers, and founders. A former Web3 and fintech founder, Bruce will share his journey from Crypto Founder to AI Founder, exploring AI communities, agent economies, and tokenized coordination. Join him at Money Frontier 2026. Get your tickets and learn more:

The biggest misconception about Virtuals: We're not in the launchpad business. We're in the builder business. The token launch is a moment. The ecosystem is forever. While others compete on launch mechanics, we're focused on building: the strongest AI founder network the strongest AI trader network the strongest AI distribution network and increasingly, one of the strongest robotics communities in the world The question isn't: "Where should I launch?" The question is: "Who do I want in my corner after I launch?" That's the game we're playing.

Open weights don’t need full parity with frontier labs. They only need what I call “pleb parity”: get close enough on high-value, high-volume task at a time, so 20 specialized plebs can divide the work and level the game against one elite. When you have a gang of equally talented, frugal and relentless Chinese AI founders, who stays #1# on the leaderboard matters less. What matters is that whenever one falls behind, another open-weight peer fills the gap very soon My simple mental model for Anthropic/OpenAI’s future ARR is the frontier-call ratio: Across an end-to-end business outcome, what % of steps still MUST call the most expensive frontier model? As plebs pushes that ratio down, pricing power and future ARR growth expectations get eroded. Think of the most elite revenue-generating team inside a company. How many seats truly need to be filled by Ivy/Stanford grads? AI stacks will look the same: frontier intelligence for the key steps where it materially changes the outcome; open weights everywhere else. The only domains I can think of with a real case for unlimited frontier-token budgets 1) Quant trading, mm and pod shops: RenTech, Jane Street, Point72 etc where raw intellectual horsepower can be translated directly into P&L 2) Ultra-high-stakes discovery: next-gen chips and materials, cancer drugs, etc. But even there, the upside/scale is limited by the even more scarce giga brain human minds to define the right problem and know where to tinker, not by token or compute For the rest of the world, and most knowledge-work domains, pleb parity is probably the long-term equilibrium. Long live the plebs. Kudos to every Chinese AI founder and engineer working against the odds to make it happen