For new nuclear tech, competing with cheap solar on cost is a losing battle. The winning strategy is targeting "premium power" customers—like the military or hyperscalers—who have mission-critical needs for 24/7 clean, reliable energy and are willing to pay above market rates. This creates a viable beachhead market.

To de-risk innovation, teams must avoid the trap of building easy foundational parts (the "pedestal") first. Drawing on Alphabet X's model, they should instead tackle the hardest, most uncertain challenge (the "monkey"). If the core problem is unsolvable, the pedestal is worthless.

While solar panels are inexpensive, the total system cost to achieve 100% reliable, 24/7 coverage is massive. These "hidden costs"—enormous battery storage, transmission build-outs, and grid complexity—make the final price of a full solution comparable to nuclear. This is why hyperscalers are actively pursuing nuclear for their data centers.

The massive energy consumption of AI has made tech giants the most powerful force advocating for new power sources. Their commercial pressure is finally overcoming decades of regulatory inertia around nuclear energy, driving rapid development and deployment of new reactor technologies to meet their insatiable demand.

The narrative of energy being a hard cap on AI's growth is largely overstated. AI labs treat energy as a solvable cost problem, not an insurmountable barrier. They willingly pay significant premiums for faster, non-traditional power solutions because these extra costs are negligible compared to the massive expense of GPUs.

Conventional innovation starts with a well-defined problem. Afeyan argues this is limiting. A more powerful approach is to search for new value pools by exploring problems and potential solutions in parallel, allowing for unexpected discoveries that problem-first thinking would miss.

When pursuing a long-term strategic solution, dedicate product management time to high-level discovery and partner alignment first. This doesn't consume engineering resources, allowing the dev team to remain focused on mitigating the immediate, more visceral aspects of the problem.

When OpenSea faced rampant NFT theft, the team shifted focus from mitigating symptoms on their platform (a 'whack-a-mole' problem) to addressing the root cause with external wallet providers. This ecosystem-level thinking led to a far more impactful, lasting solution.

A large government commitment, like the $80 billion nuclear development plan with Westinghouse, does more than create a single customer. It acts as a powerful catalyst for the entire industry. This de-risks the supply chain, signals market viability, and attracts massive private capital (e.g., Brookfield), creating tailwinds for all players.