Former Facebook privacy chief Chris Kelly said Monday that the next phase of the artificial intelligence boom will focus on greater efficiency.
As major AI players work to build the infrastructure needed to support AI workloads, Kelly told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the industry will need to streamline these power-intensive developments.
“We run our brains on 20 watts. We don’t need gigawatt power plants to reason,” Kelly said. “I think finding efficiency will be one of the key things that the big players in AI will focus on.”
Kelly, who was also general counsel at Facebook, added that companies that can make a breakthrough in reducing data center costs will become AI winners.
The data center market has racked up more than $61 billion in infrastructure contracts in 2025 as hyperscalers rush into a global construction craze, according to S&P Global.
OpenAI alone has over $1.4 trillion in AI commitments over the next few years, including massive partnerships with the GPU leader. Nvidia and infrastructure giants Oracle And Basic weave.
But the data center frenzy has sparked growing concerns about where the energy needed for these constructions will come from, with an electricity grid already under strain.
Nvidia and OpenAI announced a plan in September for at least 10 gigawatts of data centers, roughly equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 8 million U.S. homes.
Ten gigawatts is also about the same amount of electricity as New York City’s peak summer demand in 2024, according to the New York Independent System Operator.
Cost concerns were further fueled after DeepSeek launched a large free and open source language model in December at a cost of less than $6 million, the company said, significantly less than its U.S. competitors.
