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Robert Murphy

CEO

Othersphere

play_circle_outline Innovative Tech for Sustainability: Supercomputing, Generative AI, Data Leveraging, and Scalable Apps for Hard Problem Solving

play_circle_outline Othersphere: Revolutionizing Infrastructure with Sustainable Software and Collaborative Stakeholder Partnerships

play_circle_outline Leveraging AI for project optimization in renewable energy

play_circle_outline Sustainability goals in corporate and the role of AI

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Robert Murphy, Othersphere

Robert Murphy

CEO Othersphere

Robert Murphy, co-founder and CEO of Othersphere, discusses the intersection of technology and sustainability. The company has a software platform that helps accelerate the deployment of low carbon infrastructure. By breaking the world into square kilometer tiles and assessing potential project permutations, they aim to deploy trillions of dollars quickly to meet climate goals. The platform analyzes data on economics, emissions, and fit with local surroundings to help stakeholders work together and scale better solutions. Their focus is on creating a multi-co... Read more

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What is the significance of sustainability technology innovation in relation to big data and generative AI, and how are companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, AWS, Google, and others democratizing access to supercomputing capabilities? add

What is the main goal of the multi-commodity, multi-user platform described in the text? add

What process did the team use to optimize projects involving hydrogen electrolyzers and renewable energy sources? add

What are some challenges companies face when trying to implement sustainability goals and solutions, and how can managed services help streamline the process? add

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Robert Murphy, Othersphere

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>> Hello, welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in New York City at the NYSE New York Stock Exchange here in our CUBE East Studios here on the show floor. I'm John Furrier again. We are bringing all the action this week, climate week is here, UN General Assembly. Of course, we love talking about generative AI and technology tech for sustainability is a topic. Robert Murphy is the co-founder and CEO of Othersphere. Robert, thanks for coming on theCUBE.

Robert Murphy

>> John, thanks for having me.

>> So obviously I just did a tweet called hashtag tech for sustainability. I don't think I've ever seen that hashtag before, so I thought it was clever. Probably has been out there. But this is really a big part of sustainability technology innovation now more than ever now that you've got the big data actually really happening. Okay, you've got generative AI has opened up the aperture for users and applications and certainly with agentic systems coming, puts a lot of emphasis on if you can make data and technology scale work to your advantage, you can move the needle big time in these hard problem areas. Add to that, the fact that companies like Nvidia, Broadcom and some of these semiconductor companies and the hyper-scalers like AWS, Google and others, they're bringing essentially supercomputing to the masses and democratizing compute hour. So we're starting to see visibility in our Q Research team putting out a narrative on this. I talk about it all the time. What's after cloud? And cloud brought SaaS to us and large scale compute and operator efficiency. Now you're starting to see agentic systems kind of be a new add-on to SaaS and a new category is emerging that I call scalable apps. And these are new entrepreneurial solved problems where people are looking at hard problems that couldn't be solved in the past and using the power of the cloud and supercomputing capabilities to solve stuff. You see it in healthcare, biology, chemistry, and in climate change, it's an emerging area. We're seeing it early now. This is going to be a big part of our conversation the next few years. You're in the middle of technology in sustainability and climate. This is a big area. What's your reaction to that and what's your thoughts?

Robert Murphy

>> I think you hit the nail on the head. We're covering this actually coming in from two sort of different angles that are really relevant to this. So what we're building is a software platform to accelerate the deployment of hardware functionally. So we're really looking at deploying low carbon infrastructure as quickly as possible. So whether you're building green hydrogen or low carbon data centers, it's all the same concept as how do we build quickly. We need to deploy trillions of dollars very fast to catch up with our climate goals. And the reality is building anything in the real world is very hard. So our software platform basically breaks the world into little under square kilometer tiles and we assess billions of potential project permutations for any given capital asset all at once. So lets you basically search the globe. So we created a search engine for sustainable infrastructure. So the idea then is we help those who are designing, building funding this infrastructure do their jobs well, and that's part of it. So that's where our current system is built all in the cloud. It's made possible with that supercomputing all the data that the world is gathering and we're bringing together to try to help the world make-

>> You're a use case. You're an example of leveraging the timing and the nexus of supercomputing, large-scale data sets availability, in this case creating a grid.

Robert Murphy

>> Absolutely.

>> It looks like grid computing. I hate to use that word. It's an old word, but it's coming back.

Robert Murphy

>> We couldn't do what we're doing today maybe five years ago, it'd be very difficult with the compute capacity available today and the data available today. And that's not just about data collection and sensors and more so actually we're bringing more information in about the real world. It's also there's more open data, there's more sort of a push to make these things more commoditized so the world can react better. So on the one hand we're doing that to hopefully deploy infrastructure more quickly, but we're also on the other side of it, because we are a user of big compute, we use AI. And so we are then thinking about how are we part of the problem? How can we be part of the solution? And so in particular, they're helping deploy data centers using AI. So AI to build AI is what we can do to hopefully do it in a more sustainable way.

>> It's interesting. It's what I love about your story and your company, one, the mission's phenomenal too, but you're on both sides. And I was talking about this on my last podcast last week with Dave Vellante, my co-host, co-founder of theCUBE is that we're seeing an evolution now that I've never seen in my career where you're seeing all the inflection points I've been involved in either had either backend innovation, inflection point, game changer or front end. Web front end, servers, I guess not really much, but mostly front end. I could search the web. Mobile front end, the backend cloud. And then cloud came on, that's the backend. So front end, front end, backend, okay? And now with this wave, it's both backend and the front end. So your application Notable is great mission and if that works, it's great, but the backend, you'll have to be involved in both. And we're seeing companies now look at resetting their entire platforms because they have to be both backend and front end. So for example, I can adopt a new stack and say, "Hey, I'm on the new stack, look at me. I've got all the fashion," but they don't put the processes in place. On the app side, that falls down. So it's going to put a lot of pressure on IT builders, developers, executives, whether they're fighting defensive, intelligent threats on the security side or just rolling out an end-to-end application with generative AI. So both of those theaters are exploding with opportunity, but if you don't do it right, it's a problem. I'm sure you agree, but that's what you're doing.

Robert Murphy

>> And we're trying to retrofit basically a lot of processes, whether they're IT processes or financial processes in terms of how we should deploy capital in the real world. And we have to do it fast because we're behind in terms of our climate goals. And so to catch up with those things, we need the big players of the world, the big companies, the big financiers, the governments to moving quickly. But it's not easy to do that, it's not that you can snap your fingers because they work with the systems that are in place around them. And so this takes time. So we're trying to help.

>> And I think that's going to also determine who wins and who loses. And I think the people who can do both, it's a little bit more cap backs of funding, but the spoils will be there for whoever does it. Let's take a minute to discuss what you guys do. We jumped right in because I love the climate change and tech angle you guys have. Talk about the company, the mission, the origination story, what you guys do.

Robert Murphy

>> Well, I grew up in oil and gas. I grew up in Yemen. My dad worked in oil and gas, so I never got very creative, I never... The apple didn't fall far from the tree. And so I worked in energy my whole life. I worked as an oil and gas consultant and a renewable energy consultant at the World Bank for a few years, midstream companies. I was at Chevron for a long time and then moved over to the startup world. I was at an environmental data startup for about five years. Really loved the idea of just building something new, it shortens your life but it's fun. And so started Othersphere with my co-founder. We spun out a breakthrough energy. Bill Gates' climate funding vehicle, they sort of got us off the ground and we've been working with phenomenal partners like Google since. And basically the goal is to... we're actually doing an extra level of complexity because the hardware we're trying to accelerate out into the world is a lot of what the breakthroughs of the world are funding. So new ways of making green steel or lower carbon cement, that's very hard and it's a physical process perspective, but then it's equally hard to get that actually scaled so you can prove your machine works, but then you need the financiers, the insurers, the regulators and customers to all get behind you. And so what we're trying to do is bring that piece together and help the markets as a whole move more quickly because a multi-stakeholder exercise. down to communities too, that you can have the best product in the world, the best technology, but if people don't want it built near you, you have a problem.

>> What's your North star? I want to get into some of the tactical things you do. This is again, a big idea. This is one of those go big or go home kind of moments. And by the way, there's a good market for it, I don't think you guys are going to go home because the data center, we'll get to a second and nuclear reactors soon. What's the North Star? When you see a steady state for your business, what does that look like? Who are you selling to? What does that future look like?

Robert Murphy

>> We want to basically be is a multi-commodity, multi-user platform over time. So we started with Hydrogen today we move on to data centers, sustainable aviation fuel, a variety of other sort of commodity and infrastructure sectors, but then bring in those other stakeholders. We start with developers, so the company's actually putting steel on the ground but then move to the financiers, the insurers, the policymakers, the off-takers, all of these stakeholders who need to be part of the solution. So we help with analysis. Our whole platform is very much a big data AI analysis platform, but our main mission is alignment to drive action. And so can we actually have these groups work together to scale better solutions more quickly?

>> And your customers are trying to deploy infrastructure, Apex infrastructure to do things whether it's computing or do something in their business and do it in a sustainable way. That's the next mission.

Robert Murphy

>> It's basically deploying hardware to do basically create or work with electrons, molecules or bits. And that's all of the things we need to be reforming pretty quickly while also giving people all... I mean, what we have here and giving us better, fancier things over time, but also the billions of people around the world who don't have any of it yet. So there's a huge challenge in terms of human prosperity set against the challenge of how you should deliver it without making mess everything in the process.

>> Well first of all, a lot of these big ideas sometimes don't get off the ground because you need to have that beachhead landing business model that evolves over time. We all know startups, as Steve Jobs famously said, "You don't end up building what you originated, you zigzag around it, but you stay on the north star." The market right now, if you look at the CapEx spending on data centers and cloud providers for example, you mentioned Google and there were others like AWS, even Oracle said they're going to have a nuclear reactor. At Three Mile Island Microsoft's going to turn off . There's a demand for power and data center capacity, which is essentially electricity and our raw materials of earth are needed and it's not always there. I mean, I can buy all the GPUs from Nvidia, but if I can't get the power, I could have them all looking beautiful in Iraq, but if I don't have the power out of the lope, I can't run them. So people are looking at this now as a global phenomenon. Again, the CapEx spending is so high, it's kind of an arms race there. There's a huge impact climate with this and it's not just in the US, you've got China as well. It's a global market. How do you guys sell to that? What's the value proposition to those guys? Are you selling to them? Are you targeting those companies? Are you targeting enterprises how to run the new data centers with the new gear? What are some of the customers you have right now?

Robert Murphy

>> Well, we started working with hydrogen initially, and so mostly industrial customers, developers, some hardware OEMs, and so working at the hydrogen sector and then data centers is a natural bridge from that because some of them are actually interested in using hydrogen as backup power, but also a hydrogen electrolyzer, which is electricity. To make hydrogen is actually in some ways fairly similar to a data center, depending on the scale. And so what they're all looking for is a place where you can find land, they want water, they want to be able to build hopefully near people that are accepting of that. They want cheap power, whether it's electricity or gas-fired backup or whatever the inputs are for that. And then the difference is really the off-takers. So hydrogen are looking for someone to actually use their hydrogen, data center developers looking for the transmission bandwidth to get low-latency compute to their end users. So it's all a location question. And then what's really interesting now is that a lot of these physical commodity decarbonization pathways lean on electricity, not all of them, but there's a lot of bias towards using electricity for one thing or another. If they're competing with data centers and compute for those green electrons, we have a huge bottleneck then in terms of how quickly we can build the real capacity need to generate the power but also move it around. So transporting energy is one of our biggest problems. And so how do we solve for that while the two of them not running into each other? My hope is actually they can be collaborative. So I can say I'm going to build a data center here and it actually made big sense to build an electrolyzer next door because they one conserve the other, but also maybe the data center team will be happy because they're near transmission lines. The electrolyzer team will be happy near pipelines or air off-takers. And so there's a way to do these things in a coherent aligned way and that's how we hopefully solve it.

>> And you're in hydrogen now? Not yet in data center.

Robert Murphy

>> Yes. We're in the middle of developing that right now.

>> Okay. So what is the business plan for your company? As you mentioned data center because you're bringing up a system design by looking at the elements together. It's really a holistic approach.

Robert Murphy

>> Exactly.

>> Is that what you want to be?

Robert Murphy

>> Yeah. It's enterprise science. So our users subscribe to the tool and basically what it does is it looks at every site around the world, billions of permutations, and we rate them on three main criteria: economics, emissions, and fit with local surroundings. And that's the holistic piece. So you have to do it right and you can just optimize for cheap, but eventually the climate piece will catch up with you. But also if you don't look at the local, human and environmental factors, eventually the project is they slowed down, it doesn't happen at all. And so how do you think about these things quickly but effectively together?

>> Robert, the constant theme I'm hearing in all the innovators that come on theCUBE is in this wave besides the whole theater's back-end front-end innovation is that the democratization aspect comes in. For example, I could imagine your software being used for municipalities. One of the things that we're tracking on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE and the research is edge computing is going to have capability. You have electronic cars, you're going to have cameras on every corner, you're going to have instrumentation. We're living in a world where connectivity is going to be dealing with bits, data and data's the key to all this. So as this data, this problem goes... Okay, big problem now is data centers and solving that, but it's energy, it's electricity, everything's there. But also the impact aspect. I mean in the past, what is a small town or anyone just, "Hey, I'm going to build my town so that every Tesla could be managed properly, pluggable." What do you do there?

Robert Murphy

>> Well, you have to think about it. I mean, they've already been pushed back. I mean, the Three Mile Island announcement is very interesting, but there's already been pushed back around the US and globally for data centers that if they use gas-fired backup and so local emissions or are they going to undermine or raise local power prices. So there's all these knock-on effects. And so if you come in, you build at large-scale infrastructure, you deploy a lot of CapEx, you hopefully create jobs in the community, you hopefully create a lot of local benefit, but can you actually watch out for the negative consequences and the unintended consequences and plan around them? And either avoid them or work with communities right up front so everyone knows what they're getting themselves into and have sort of benefits from the project's feedback to communities so that it isn't more of a sort of an extractive relationship where I'm going to put a thing on the ground, it's going to take your power and take your water and you're going to just watch it from distance. But how do we do this together?

>> The impact is huge and I think having that sustainability and impact of the earth is key. You can kind of kill two birds with one stone in this case with your software. Quick question on the climate change since it we're in climate week. How would you peg the area where that market we're in now? Early innings and now it feels super not even game on yet, but you guys are now looking encroaching into what I see as tech innovation play for climate as a first party citizen to the value proposition. It's like Uber. Uber is not a taxi company. It's a tech company that does ride hailing, they called it. So they do two things. They help people get from point A to point B. Now they got food and others, but they're really a tech company. And so it sounds like this is kind of the fee.

Robert Murphy

>> I wonder how in terms of where we are with all of this. So Uber's a good example. So Uber basically came along and in some ways they didn't disrupt, but they replaced taxi companies. They just replaced what we were doing. They kind of just pushed to an existing player aside. I think with climate, because it's so regulated, these sectors are so interwoven into our lives and they're very expensive and the infrastructure, once it's built, people want to use it, that the incumbents are essential. I don't think you can come along and be an uber of a... pick your sector, picker of steel. I mean, it's unlikely. It's possible. It's unlikely to build a whole new steel company that basically overwhelms all the incumbents. I think you work with them. I think they have the experience and know how to build these things. They run them for a long time, you help them just run them better. And they're all trying from the inside, but the markets expect certain things .

>> You're managing the incumbents.

Robert Murphy

>> Yes. And they're full of people who want to do really good work. I was in oil and gas for a long time, there's full of earth scientists and very few of them went to school to destroy the earth. They're there trying to make a difference, keep the lights on for all of us. And so how do we-

>> It's a need. We all need that.

Robert Murphy

>> Exactly.

>> So how about some of the cool things you're doing? What's some of the cool projects you're working on internally to power your value platform? You guys do a lot of work with data. Let's talk about what you guys are doing. What's the coolest thing you guys got going on?

Robert Murphy

>> We have dozens and dozens of data layers to drive our analysis. And some of them... I actually really enjoy the data side. I think that's my sort of pet favorite area, but I'll say-

>> Let's get into it.

Robert Murphy

>> My broader team, one of the things they've done is basically optimization of projects. So when you build a hydrogen electrolyzer, you want to think about its actual profile and you're balancing for hourly power prices, hourly grid, carbon intensity, hourly wind and solar data. How you actually want to deliver to all your off-takers. And so that process is very computationally intensive, but you need to do it to then set your renewables project, that's part of the project to the right size, the actual electrolyzer of the right size, the whole system. So what we did is basically train AI models on our billions of modeled projects to then be able to do this very quickly. So it would take hundreds of years potentially to sort of optimize all these projects individually. But by using AI, we're able to do it where basically it runs... Every time we retrain the model, it loads from users immediately and in 30 seconds they can go from the AI version to the actual deterministic model at the project level. And that's a huge leap in terms of being able to give the fidelity to our users to know where good projects are.

>> I mean, first of all, I think it's mind-blowing and I think to me that is just such an awesome thing because I mean, could you have done that a decade ago?

Robert Murphy

>> No.

>> I mean, that would've been a high performance computing problem. Hundreds of thousands of hours of compute time ran into some HPC farm somewhere, come back with an answer. The lag is off the charts.

Robert Murphy

>> And there's also where one of the upsides of AI, because a lot of conversation about AI using a lot of energy and that's right. And if we use AI for nicer cat videos, there's maybe a missed opportunity there. But for us, we basically use AI to avoid a lot of that sort of brute force compute. And so it's a more efficient way both from a cost and energy perspective to get to the right answer. AI for us actually reduces a lot of energy use in that case.

>> It's interesting you mentioned AI for cat videos. This brings up a distinction. I want to get your thoughts on this because you're in it right now. Operational AI, I just made the term up, but call it operational. There's operational benefits to AI and I think there's a question of AI as a bubble. I think it's going to be not as bad as a dot com bubble because I think there'll be some dead companies that just didn't invest in both backend, front end or too much backend on the front end. So I think there'll be some carnage, but I don't think it's going to pop. I think there'll be slow air will come out of the bubble. Because this real operational advantages, you're an example of that. Just what you just said, you're using the compute power and all the capabilities you have now on your fingertips through Google Cloud and others. So you actually do the work. And so you can actually apply AI, I call this operational AI, sometimes we'll call it causal AI, but AI as a layer to manage either complexities with automation, whether it's building new abstraction layers, managing data sets, doing projects like managing the compute. I mean, you can solve problems. We're seeing it in all these hard vertical, these are the scalable apps I was talking about. Chemistry, seeing it, you're seeing it in biology here with climate. This is a first generation opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Robert Murphy

>> Yes, I agree. Absolutely. Especially for sort of really hard computational challenges as you're saying, sort of like gene editing and folding and so on, what we're doing in terms of climate modeling or basically industrial systems modeling. It's hard to do it the old-fashioned brute force way. We are well past the Excel version. I mean, the world still works in Excel and it's a great tool, but it isn't up to the challenges that some of the things we're facing. And then I think on the day-to-day, there's absolutely, definitely some overshoot. I'm sure there's lots of hype and froth and all this, but there's a lot of fire inside that smoke because I think AI will have a lot of role to play in sort of making a lot of our task easier people, more effective, and then hopefully helping challenge or solve some of these really hard challenges.

>> What's really great is the sustainability goals have always been on corporate. All of our top guests, we've had on theCUBE, CDOs and leaders all talk about sustainability. I won't say it's big cliche or it's been just lip service because it's hard. I think now with solutions like what you're doing is I can see this idea of having a managed service saying, "Hey, I want to deploy something on infrastructure for whatever," whether it's edge computing or whatever, and pull up data in a very quick way, assess and actually architect and deploy infrastructure. The alternative would be, "Okay, get some funding, get a committee, hire a consultant." No one knew what to do. It's hard.

Robert Murphy

>> Well, that's the thing. well-intentioned. There's very few people that want to actually ruin the world. It's just hard. And then so if you're having to go out and gather the data manually, bring people together, do some analysis in Excel, put some things in some maps and so on, it's slow, it's cumbersome. So we're not just talking about if you're building a data center, but if you're looking to where do you actually want to sort of lease space and actually put your compute in a data center, be able to sort of understand very quickly what that market looks like and where will be the lowest carbon commute, because... or compute, it's not just the hyper-scalers and the building and operating data center. There's everyone using it too. That we are built in Google Cloud so we can see our carbon footprint and we move all of our compute to their highest carbon-free energy regions. And that's critical for us. And I think we're not alone at all.

>> Othersphere, that name. What's the meaning behind it? How did you guys come to that? Was it you and your co-founders said, "We're going to build another sphere."? The sphere in Vegas is hot right now, so I love the word sphere in there, biosphere, all kinds of... What's the meaning behind it?

Robert Murphy

>> It was me sitting in the garage during COVID with a little bit too much time in my hands probably. But it's basically we're trying to bring together a sort of atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, anthroposphere, in terms of all the human elements. It's basically this global systems model and we need to be thinking about how all these things interplay with each other. And so we focus a lot on the human and the economics and side of things, and we're more and more aware of the environmental piece. But really it's like, "What happens when you push down on one button over here? What happens on the other side of the world?" And so Othersphere was a, "Try not to have an overly grandiose way of saying we're trying to bring those spheres together and try to have, build understanding around how our actions collectively have impact out in the world."

>> You're a data company, you're a platform company, you're a tech company with climate as a first party citizen as an application built into it. Would that be a fair-

Robert Murphy

>> I think that's a fair way to put it together.

>> And I think this gives other people the opportunity to do the same. I think this will move the needle on sustainability in corporate America and large scale infrastructure price as they spend the CapEx to grow. Whether that's data centers or other resource intensive resource.

Robert Murphy

>> We have trillions of dollars to deploy very quickly. And so how do we aim it and do it well?

>> Okay. Final question. Your vision of the future?

Robert Murphy

>> Well, basically we find a way to provide for the 8 to 10 billion people in the world who one this kind of prosperity in the most efficient way possible. So we're really focused on sustainable equitable prosperity. So how do we give people a semblance of this without ruining everything process? And we can help software and data do that a little bit better, fantastic.

>> You feel that we are on the right path with the trends with supercomputing being democratized and a large scale cloud providers processing more?

Robert Murphy

>> It's a huge enabler. We still need the actual lower carbon waves of producing different commodities and so on, or wind and solar deployments to actually have green electrons and other renewable energy sources as well. So we need the upstream pieces to then have the use of software and data to deploy it better.

>> Robert, great conversation and congratulations. I love your mission. Obviously I'm excited and energized by it and we'll keep in touch.

Robert Murphy

>> Fantastic, John. Thanks for having me on theCUBE. Appreciate it.

>> Okay. I'm John Furrier here at the NYSE Studios for theCUBE, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.