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.”

Crypto exchange Coinbase said on Tuesday it is laying off about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a broader restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing the use of AI tools to improve efficiency.

The restructuring would see the company flattening its organizational structures to just five layers below the CEO and COO levels, according to an internal email that the company’s CEO Brian Armstrong posted on the company blog.

The reorg would implement new requirements for managers to contribute more, and leaders could now have more than 15 direct reports. The company is also focusing on putting together small teams that use AI tools, and will experiment with “one-person teams” that would combine engineering, design and product management roles.

Coinbase expects to incur approximately $50 million to $60 million in severance costs, it said in an SEC filing.

In the email, Armstrong cited the volatility of crypto markets as a reason to reexamine the company’s cost structure.

“While we’ve managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth,” he wrote.

He also highlighted the need to make the most of AI tools: “AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what’s possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it’s accelerating every day […] This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”