Powering the Next American Century: US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and NVIDIA’s Ian Buck on the Genesis Mission

Source: NVIDIA AI Blog

Introduction

AI will help build the energy it needs.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale and High‑Performance Computing Ian Buck made this case Thursday morning at the SCSP AI+ Expo during a 30‑minute fireside chat, moderated by SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari and titled “Powering the Next American Century.” Their argument: American leadership in AI runs through American leadership in energy.

“Energy is life. The more energy you have, the more affordable energy you have, the more opportunities you have in your society.” – Chris Wright

The Genesis Mission—the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s effort to apply AI to scientific discovery—is where the vision meets execution. NVIDIA is a key DOE partner, building on two decades of collaboration with the national labs.

“NVIDIA is 100 % committed and invested in Genesis. I’ve never seen more excitement across the lab and industry.” – Ian Buck

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The DOE Partnership

The DOE contributes 17 national labs, scientists, national challenges, and data. NVIDIA brings the full stack—chips, algorithms, methods, and 20 years of partnership with the labs.

Two AI supercomputers are being built together at Argonne National Laboratory:

• Equinox – currently standing up with 10,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs, using the same hardware and software that power today’s AI models.
• Solstice – planned to use 100,000 GPUs with NVIDIA Vera Rubin, delivering roughly 5,000 exaflops—about five times the combined performance of the entire current TOP500 list.

“We’re creating all the same technology, all the same hardware, all the same software building blocks used by major AI labs around the world, for all of world science to access.” – Ian Buck

An example in practice: an open‑source NVIDIA AI model trained on 1.5 million physics papers and fine‑tuned on 100,000 fusion‑specific papers. The resulting specialized AI agent lets DOE researchers interrogate the literature and accelerate discovery.

Energy and the Pace of Building

Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has tripled oil production and doubled natural‑gas production but seen little growth in electricity generation—a concern because electricity is the primary energy source for AI.

Wright highlighted three pillars of the U.S. grid:

• Natural gas – continued reliance as a flexible resource.
• Nuclear – near‑term leverage of small modular reactors (SMRs); three SMRs are slated to go critical by July 4, with additional large reactors and SMRs to follow.
• Coal – still part of the mix, though its role is being reassessed.

On fusion, the DOE has established a strategic fusion office, and lab and university programs are being “hypercharged” by AI‑driven computing power.

“We have to fix this bureaucratic and complex electricity grid so that it can grow fast, keeping up with AI. If we don’t, we’ll slow down AI.” – Chris Wright

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang describes AI as a five‑layer cake (energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications) – the DOE covers the bottom layer. Buck emphasized the next layer:

“From Hopper to Blackwell we increased performance by 30× and performance‑per‑watt by 25×.” – Ian Buck

Wright added that AI can dramatically shorten grid interconnection studies—from years to weeks or even hours.

What Success Looks Like

Looking 12 months ahead, Wright expects concrete deliverables in fusion, materials science, and grid interconnection—outcomes that were previously unattainable.

“We will have deliverables that we couldn’t do before, and now we can. That’s the goal of Genesis: drive discovery and bring the benefits to humans.” – Chris Wright

Addressing public concern that AI and data centers will raise electricity costs, Wright argued the opposite:

“Building more electrical generation and data centers is actually the mechanism to lower electricity costs and make our grid stronger.”

Both AI and energy are essential to human progress.

“AI doesn’t love, it doesn’t have passion. It’s just going to make humans more powerful and better at pursuing whatever your passions are. It supercharges humans—it does not replace you.” – Chris Wright