When it comes to the specter of AI’s labor-displacing potential, Jensen Huang thinks that the American worker has nothing to fear. During a conversation Monday night with MSNBC’s Becky Quick hosted by the Milken Institute — an economic policy think tank, the jovial Nvidia CEO said that AI was an industrial-scale generator of jobs, not the harbinger of mass unemployment that so-called “AI doomers” have often accused it of being.

A number of different topics were broached during the talk, but a central theme that kept coming back was the ongoing economic anxiety surrounding the AI industry and whether it was something Americans should be legitimately worried about. At one point Quick noted: “This is happening so quickly. Is there a bigger dislocation than we’ve seen in the past that leads to greater inequality? And what do we do about that?”

Throughout the night, Huang struck an optimistic note. “AI creates jobs,” Huang asserted during the discussion, adding that “AI is [the] United States’ best opportunity to re-industrialize” itself. Huang noted that the AI industry is powered by a new breed of industrial factories—the kinds producing the hardware that acts as critical infrastructure for the AI business. (Huang’s company notably sells a lot of that hardware.) Those factories necessarily need workers, as does the rest of the blossoming AI industry.

Just because a specific task is automated, that doesn’t mean that a person’s entire job is going to be replaced, Huang reasoned. People who believe this “misunderstand that the purpose of a job and the task of a job are related” but not ultimately the same thing, he said. In other words, Huang’s argument is that even when AI takes over a discrete task within a role, the broader function that employee serves in an organization is likely to remain.

Relatedly, Huang was critical of people who allege AI will dominate humanity or that it will wipe out huge sectors of the economy. “My greatest concern is that we scare…people—all the people that we’re telling these science fiction stories to, to the point where AI is so unpopular in the United States, or people are so afraid of it, that they don’t actually engage it,” he said.

Ironically, much of the “doomer” rhetoric has been generated by the AI industry itself, and critics maintain that such hyperbole has been used as a marketing gimmick designed to gin up buzz and excitement for products that aren’t anywhere near the capabilities that such rhetoric suggests.

It remains to be seen what kind of long-term impact AI will have on the overall economy. That said, reputable financial and academic organizations have suggested that as much as 15% percent of jobs in the U.S. will be eliminated over the next several years as a result of AI.

Moment Energy CEO Edward Chiang believes demand for power in North America is infinite — and that his startup has the solution.

The company, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, takes a novel approach to repurposing electric vehicle batteries, Chiang told TechCrunch. The company’s approach is special, he said, because of its dual focus on safety and modularity.

Investors apparently agree. On Tuesday, Moment Energy announced it has raised a $40 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million. The round was led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm.

In Chiang’s view, the electric grid in North America is in a losing race to keep up with this demand for power, driven by an increasingly extreme climate, the rise of electric vehicles, and the data center boom. So far, he says mostly Chinese companies have filled this demand — to the tune of about 72% of the global market, according to BNEF — adding a national security wrinkle to the picture.

Moment Energy is tackling this by taking battery packs from electric vehicles, ripping out the automakers’ battery management systems, and writing its own software to manage the packs. It then packages the battery modules into larger grid-scale storage solutions that can host a wide mix of battery chemistries, allowing customers to benefit from future advances in the technology while also reducing downtime if a particular module fails.

Crucially, Chiang said, Moment Energy is doing this all with UL Certification, making it the first company to repurpose batteries with a stamp of approval from the safety organization.

Chiang said other companies working on repurposing EV batteries for long-term storage often claim that they test their products against UL certification standards, but that they don’t actually obtain the certifications, which requires the use of certain components.

“What most other second life [battery] companies are now trying to say is, let’s just lobby to make second life UL certification easier, because it is impossible to get UL certification, as it stands,” he said. “But at Moment, we say that’s not true. We got it.”

UL certification may sound boring, but Chiang said it can make a difference not only when it comes to safety, but also in how these energy storage products are insured.

He claimed (without naming them) that other energy storage companies will leave an automaker’s battery management system in tact on the re-used batteries, and essentially trick the pack into thinking it’s still on the road to coax the right amount of discharge.

This could make these storage solutions either uninsurable or too costly to insure, Chiang said. He pointed to Liberty Mutual’s venture arm participation in Moment Energy’s Series B as proof that his company’s solution is above board.

“Maybe as engineers, or as consumers, we think that’s kind of interesting,” he said. “In reality, fire inspectors don’t think that’s interesting. Automakers don’t think that’s interesting. You can imagine if — I really hope this never happens — but if a battery catches fire, the fire inspector will say, ‘Oh, hey, there’s a Tesla battery management system in here, or there’s a Nissan battery management system in here,’ and the automaker will say: ‘I’ve never given permission for anybody to hack and bootleg my safety systems.’”

Chiang’s confidence seems to come from a number of places. Despite being small — Chiang said Moment Energy has around 72 employees — the company has signed supply deals with Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. It secured a $20 million loan from the Department of Energy. And it’s building a gigawatt-scale factory in Austin, Texas.

Moment also has a growing book of diverse customers, from utilities, to industrial companies, and — yes — data centers.

But Chiang said he also thinks a lot of Moment Energy’s approach comes from the fact that it’s a Canadian company at heart, removed from some of the most base impulses of Silicon Valley.

While Chiang said “all the data center companies have been reaching out to us,” he also stressed that his company didn’t want to walk into a trap by fundraising against promises that can’t be met.

“What we’ve been really thinking about as a whole is just staying focused overall in what we know, and what we’re building, and serving real customers, versus trying to sign up deals that are five years or 10 years down the road just to fundraise. And unfortunately, we see that a lot of Bay Area startups are less so trying to deliver product, but they’re trying to raise the next round,” he said.

“But for us, I think because we had roots up in Canada, a lot of Canadian companies focus on building a tangible business and a real, profitable business, as well as a high-growth business, and we’re pretty realistic when it comes to deployment.”

It’s not just you: restaurants, malls, and offices on steamy summer days really are kept colder than necessary. Air conditioning is as much about dehumidification as it is about cooling, especially in hot, humid climates like the U.S. South, where buildings can be fertile ground for hazardous molds. 

“The reason they blast the air conditioner so much is because they’re trying to reduce the humidity,” Sorin Grama, co-founder and CEO of Transaera, told TechCrunch. “In some cases in commercial buildings, the air is so cold that they have to reheat it back up.”

So Transaera has developed a new type of ventilation unit that, the company says, is significantly more efficient than existing dehumidification techniques, saving users energy and money.

Amazon, which has been testing the unit for several months in Houston, recently signed on as a customer. Other companies are following suit, to the point where Transaera now has “nine figures” worth of purchasing targets from customers, Grama said. For Amazon, the purchase reserves capacity over the next three years.

“Amazon is considering this a design solution,” he said. “Once they find a solution that works, they put that into their design standard and replicate it across their building stock.”

The device, known as a dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS), can keep the air inside commercial buildings fresh while also lightening the load on the AC. It can remove 100 pounds of water from the air every hour, meaning the AC doesn’t have to run as hard.

The idea of a DOAS isn’t new, but Transaera says its unit is up to twice as efficient at removing moisture as existing systems. 

Transaera’s secret sauce is a desiccant that coats a six-foot wheel which slowly spins inside each of its units. “It’s like silica gel on steroids.” Grama said. The company won’t disclose the specific desiccant, but it’s based on a class of materials that won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 2025.

As air passes into the unit, the desiccant draws moisture out of the air, which then passes through a heat exchanger before being dispersed into the building. Stale air is drawn out of the building along with heat from the heat exchanger, which flows through the moisture-saturated wheel. The heat from that air releases the moisture from the desiccant so it can be exhausted outside.

Amazon said Transaera’s DOAS units will help the company reduce its energy use and help it on its path toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. 

Transaera is working with existing manufacturers, including those in the U.S., to build the device. Its proprietary desiccant system slots into industry-standard commercial HVAC units. “It’s a like-for-like replacement of a legacy unit,” Grama said. “I think that’s what’s driving this demand — it’s an easy replacement.”