The AI boom has a power problem, and simply scaling up traditional energy infrastructure will not solve it.
Sami Sultan, Vice President at Darcy Partners, ex Shell wells engineer, and BCG alum, joins Episode 10 to map where the energy for the machine age could actually come from: microgrids, distributed energy resources, and a pragmatic transition where existing capabilities get repurposed rather than expanded.
In this episode:
The power question: why energy demand compounds as AI spreads, and why the sustainable path runs through distributed generation, not just bigger grids.
The transition in practice: stranded gas bridging data center demand today, old wells repurposed for energy storage tomorrow, and how capital decides what gets built.
What heavy industry brings to the table: decades of experience moving liquids, running remote operations, and managing complex infrastructure, now pointed at new problems.
The Physical AI stack arriving on sites today: red zone cameras, emissions drones, robot dogs, and the climb from sensing to agents to autonomy.
Sami's origin story: building algorithmic well navigation at Shell in 2017, trained on synthetic wells the way Waymo trained on synthetic miles, before most boardrooms knew what a GPU was.
And a first look at the three layer architecture we are building at Tryfecta: an agentic base, a physics model at the core, and command and control on top.
Part one of two. Sami returns next episode for the technology deep dive.
