KR Sridhar
KR Sridhar is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Bloom Energy, a Silicon Valley-based solid oxide fuel cell company he co-founded in 2001 under the name Ion America. Prior to founding Bloom Energy, he served as a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arizona and directed the Space Technologies Laboratory, where he led research for NASA's Mars exploration program on converting Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen. He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is best known for developing the Bloom Energy Server, a solid oxide fuel cell platform that generates on-site electricity for data centers and other large-scale facilities.
“If you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center.”
Source→“Our very first data center application was in 2013 when eBay, which used to be eBay and PayPal together... PayPal's entire business is that data center because it's all about transactions... They did not have power in Utah, and they needed power.”
Source→“If you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center. It puts out a Bloom box powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling for the data center, and it being connected to nothing else. For me, the period between 2001 and now, the 25 years, was never a question of if. It was a question of when and how soon.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.