“If you make something that's 80% as efficient, but you can get it out in six months, data centers will line up to buy it from you because they just care about time to going live.”
How I Invest with David Weisburd · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Polovets was explaining why the data-center buildout excites him as a deep-tech investor. Incumbents like Siemens make efficient custom equipment that takes years to deliver. Because data centers are held back by permitting, design and power, he sees room for faster startups, especially in energy.
Transcript
…is like, I think very, very important. The other part is like, because you're working with, you know, older industries, I think being able to, you know, kind of translate startups to like, you know, what a customer might want that doesn't work with startups, I think is also especially important.
What are you personally most excited about in the deep tech space?
I've been pretty excited about the data center build out in terms of, you know, data centers have deep pockets. All they care about is speed because they're just bottlenecked by so many things like permitting and design and energy generation. I think it's actually a really great opportunity for startups, especially on the energy side, because there's this kind of window in time where you can go compete against like Siemens or some big like power plant company because they might have something that's like very efficient, but it's custom and it takes five years to build. And if you make something that's 80% as efficient, but you can get it out in six months, like data centers will line up to buy it from you because they just care about time to, you know, time to going live. And so I think that's an area I've just been really excited about that, you know, we have this huge buildout. It's probably like one of the biggest buildouts we've had since the Industrial…
What are some companies in that space that you're very excited about?
Maybe to pick a couple that we've invested in. So we invested in a company called Critical Energy. They make geothermal power plants. So the drilling for geothermal has gotten better and better with companies like Furbo over the last few years. But then you still need a power plant to take like the…
What do you see as the bottlenecks for AI from a physical infrastructure side over the next couple of years? And how do you see that evolving?
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