Powering AI: the infrastructure behind digital growth
Examine how electricity supply, grid connections and investment shape the AI buildout. Bring physical delivery constraints into strategic conversations about technology adoption and capacity.
← Keynote Speakers
Vijay Vaitheeswaran
Director of the energy and climate program at the Council on Foreign Relations; former Economist senior editor
Fee information first. Availability is normally checked once there is a concrete intention to proceed.
What Vijay brings
Vijay Vaitheeswaran connects energy systems, technological innovation and business strategy. He helps leadership teams examine the infrastructure behind growth: electricity, investment, supply chains and the institutions needed to deliver change. His experience reporting across energy, US business and China brings an international perspective to the practical conditions for innovation. As a speaker and moderator, he can turn a broad discussion of AI or the energy transition into focused questions about capacity, incentives, delivery and commercial opportunity.
Keynote topics
Energy innovation and changing business models
Explore the technologies and commercial approaches challenging established energy industries. Assess where financing, regulation and customer needs support adoption, and where they constrain it.
The energy transition in a fragmented world
Connect energy security, climate objectives and industrial competition across markets. Consider how different political and economic conditions affect corporate investment choices.
From invention to implementation
Ask why promising innovations succeed or stall. Examine the organisational, financial and policy conditions needed to move from an appealing idea to an operational solution.
Vijay Vaitheeswaran is the Philip D. Reed senior fellow and director of the energy and climate program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as a senior editor at The Economist, covering the connections between business, technology, energy and innovation.
As the magazine’s global energy and climate innovation editor, he examined fossil fuels, electricity utilities, emerging energy technologies and the relationship between artificial intelligence and power demand. His reporting addressed changing business models, financing approaches and innovations that challenge established industries, alongside US climate and infrastructure policy.
Earlier roles included US business editor and China business editor. He opened The Economist’s first Shanghai bureau and its first Latin America bureau in Mexico City. That experience gives his analysis an international grounding in the different institutions and market conditions shaping investment.
Vaitheeswaran is the author of Power to the People and Need, Speed and Greed, and co-author with Iain Carson of Zoom. He has moderated discussions at the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Ideas Festival and CERAWeek, and taught an interdisciplinary course on energy, economics and the environment at NYU Stern.
He is an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an alumnus of Harvard Business School’s General Management Program. For leadership audiences, his contribution is to connect an ambitious strategic narrative with the physical systems, commercial incentives and institutional choices that determine whether it can be delivered.
Interested in Vijay?
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