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Chris Wright: “Fusion is a tricky problem. We've been working on it for 50…”

Featuring: Chris Wright, Republican | Secretary of Energy | National

The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright

Published November 5, 2025 | Video Starts at 46:39

It's absolutely a virtuous cycle. It is. I spoke at an AI fusion seminar recently and I'm like, Fusion is a tricky problem. We've been working on it for 50 plus years, but I think we're going to get there now. Why? Because AI is just giving us that extra horsepower, that extra ability to control a burning plasma that's going to enable fusion to work. (46:39–46:46)

CLAIM

Asserts that fusion energy has been a long-term challenge but is nearing feasibility.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Chris Wright

“20 years ago we were the largest importer of natural gas in the world.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 15:40-15:45
“We're the world's largest exporter of natural gas by far.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 16:14-16:19
“We have 115 rigs drilling for natural gas instead of 1200 rigs.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 16:18-16:25
“Today we're just by far, by a factor of 50%, the world's largest producer of oil of any country in the world.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 16:40-16:47
“The plan at FERC and the resource plans across the thing was to shut down 100 gigawatts of firm generating capacity before its end of life.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 37:05-37:15
“The rest of the world coal demand was a record high last year. It'll break that record high this year.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 40:13-40:20
“It was three years ago in one of our DOE's national labs, the National NISIC facility, National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 47:30-47:46
“2 billion people today don't have clean cooking fuels.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 55:05-55:09
“The last administration was about energy subtraction. We've got to get rid of the big energy sources and then grow the little energy…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 02:30-02:39
“The real goal is more energy. Massively more energy in the United States, around the world.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 02:47-02:53
“We have these incredible scientific institutions and we're on the cusp of massive breakthroughs in science.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 03:14-03:22
“We're going to see pathways to commercial fusion energy in the next few years.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 03:51-03:57
“Liberty Energy fracs about 20% of all the wells drilled in the US and Canada.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 10:15-10:20
“I was actually suing the federal government in Liberty Energy for their climate disclosure rule, which is just a way to make it harder to…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 12:35-12:44
“[The climate disclosure rule] doesn't change the demand for [oil and gas], just makes it harder to produce.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 12:48-12:50
“The risk is greater, so the price has to go high.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 12:49-12:53
“Most of my customers are record profitability ever, but the other 99% of Americans, they don't produce oil and gas. They just have higher…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 12:54-13:02
“The federal government has been very obstructive to energy, but most of our oil and gas isn't produced on federal lands.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 17:02-17:08
“We've had skyrocketing American energy production, but not skyrocketing American electricity production.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 17:20-17:27
“President Trump is nothing but transformative.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 17:42-17:46
“We need the same revolution in electricity production. But to do that, you got to have regulatory reform.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 17:56-18:02
“It took years, right?”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 18:47-18:49
“We're trying to work as one team in this government to make it easier to develop energy resources.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 19:31-19:39
“The world has a massive amount of energy. It has a virtually unlimited supply of energy.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 20:10-20:17
“President Trump is very frustrated that so many industries, they just made it too hard to build here and they build it overshore.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 21:42-21:48
“The biggest thing is just permitting just some certainty that you can get stuff built.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 21:57-22:03
“States are competing for [large projects] too.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 22:15-22:15
“We're going to make cancers that are death sentences today, manageable conditions in the next several years, not in decades.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 25:36-25:44
“In the next several years we're going to harness fusion energy, that power of the sun, because we have artificial intelligence.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 25:43-25:51
“Without a massive growth in our electricity production, we cannot lead in AI.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 27:51-27:56
“We need to be the leader in AI and the leader by a fair margin.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 28:28-28:34
“We announced a new machine, the Doudna supercomputer, named after Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize for crispr.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 28:59-29:07
“Speeding medical discovery, speeding our understanding of dark matter and the basic workings of the Cosmo is a focus of that Doudna…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 29:10-29:19
“We have 17 labs with massive amounts of land you can build on.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 29:40-29:45
“We will have it in six months at Oak Ridge National Lab. Three times the computing power of the top computer we have at Oak Ridge in six…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 30:07-30:17
“We're going to build huge data centers with partners. This is with Oracle and Nvidia at our Oregon National Lab.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 30:43-30:52
“It'll speed the advancement of science in the United States, that'll speed our national security complex to stay ahead of China for AI, for…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 31:07-31:19
“In 20 years, almost 20% of U.S. electricity [was from nuclear].”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 32:19-33:18
“We will have one of these next generation reactors critical within 12 months.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 34:01-34:07
“We should have 10 or more in the next 18 to 24 months of these next generation reactors going critical.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 34:19-34:28
“We will have shovels in the ground with reactors being built in the next 12 months.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 34:32-34:38
“We have so much shale gas we can massively ramp up electricity in the relatively short term through natural gas.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 35:03-35:11
“We can operate power plants, a lot of power plants. Small investments, you can get 10% more times a lot of capacity.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 35:16-35:23
“They were offsetting it, Tony, by building 22 gigawatts. So a net, a net subtraction of 78 gigawatts of dispatchable reliable.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 37:15-37:27
“We think we need 100 gigawatts of additional capacity in the next five years.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 37:38-37:43
“Coal is 125 and O as the largest source of electricity. Every year we've had an electricity grid and it will be globally for decades to…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 39:02-39:13
“Coal's like 16% of our total generating capacity today.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 39:48-39:53
“China is the world's biggest importer of oil, the world's biggest importer of natural gas.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 42:03-42:08
“Semiconductor manufacturing is going to come back to our country because of our energy cost advantages.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 42:48-42:54
“Steel manufacturing, aluminum manufacturing going to come back to our country because of our energy cost advantages.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 42:48-42:54
“We are at the start of a nuclear renaissance like this industry is going to hit critical mass and is going to grow hugely again.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 42:56-43:03
“Natural gas power has been our fastest growing and likely will be the fastest growing electricity source in the United States.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 43:07-43:19
“Oil is still the world's largest primary source of energy by a fair margin globally and will be for the rest of our lives.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 43:27-43:35
“Demand for oil grew about 1% compound annual growth rate. Coal grew 2%, natural gas grew 3% [over the last 50 years].”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 43:55-44:04
“Natural gas is cheaper. It's much cheaper than diesel. Burns cleaner, lower pollutants and lower greenhouse gas.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 44:12-44:20
“The last company I ran, that Liberty Energy, we were, you know, these frac trucks, they were, they're diesel powered giant machines. They're…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 44:28-44:37
“The problem of wind and solar has been the machines are huge. They're 10 times more steel and concrete and expensive materials than a…”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 48:40-48:51
“Fusion energy will drive down the price of energy from fusion and fission.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 49:21-49:30
“Generations from now, [fusion energy] is probably the runaway winner in low cost.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 49:29-49:29
“You cannot have a modern world without hydrocarbons for the materials, for clothes, for plastics, for energy storage mechanisms.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 49:42-49:51
“In the next three and a quarter years we're going to have quantum computing at a meaningful scale.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 52:15-52:23
“Quantum computing is part of our computing system. Even today it's just at a smaller scale.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 52:22-52:29
“All the big players, Google, Microsoft, IBM have meaningful quantum efforts.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 53:13-53:21
“The US has a huge lead in AI when I walk out of here and is transforming our society.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 54:14-54:21
“Our economic growth rates is increased from what it was before fusion energy.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 54:26-54:33
“We're losing millions of lives from indoor air pollution because they don't have basic energy systems.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 55:08-55:14
“We need to leave some hopefully bipartisan permitting reform, some legislative changes.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 56:14-56:21
“The future of America, the future of our world is intimately tied to massively more energy, more affordable, reliable, secure energy.”
The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright | Uploaded November 5, 2025 | 56:23-56:32