Project Genesis to Launch Breakthrough Acceleration?
- Nov 26, 2025
- 7 min read
Energy Policy Perspectives Vol. 12 - November 26, 2025
Project Genesis. On Monday, President Trump issued a new Executive Order (EO): “Launching the Genesis Mission.” The new program, to be managed by the Department of Energy intends to launch a Manhattan Project type effort through a new “American Science and Security Platform” (ASSP) to coordinate government agency, academic, and corporate artificial intelligence research. The project intends to make U.S. government data available for the effort. The latest EO purports that the project will “dramatically accelerate scientific discovery” in the U.S. while securing U.S. energy dominance, national security, and improvements in productivity. It is unclear what the funding of the project is or precisely how it will be funded.
Progress and awareness. While we have been skeptical of the potential efficacy of some of the numerous EOs issued by President Trump seeking to accelerate new electricity resources, nuclear energy commercialization, domestic strategic mineral supplies, expedited project permitting, etc., there can be no doubt that the EOs have raised awareness of the numerous constraints that could limit the U.S. economy in the years ahead. Awareness is half the battle. The President’s EOs have certainly elevated the conversions around energy and raw material availability while increasing private and public efforts and funding to secure more robust energy and materials supplies for artificial intelligence, energy, and manufacturing industries.
Issues with Genesis. The Project Genesis announcement raises numerous issues for us. While evoking the urgency of the Manhattan Project, elevating the nation’s AI effort to national emergency/security levels raises numerous questions, including the potential avoidance of AI regulation and alignment issues, exacerbation of international tensions, and the suitability of rushing the AI research effort. The leadership of the Department of Energy for the effort appears peculiar. DARPA or other similar entity would seem more appropriate. Consolidating important national data sets into the effort raises technical security questions. While coordinating government agency and academic AI efforts has a long history of success, it also seems unlikely that corporate interests will be willing to contribute their most cherished technology secrets to the effort.
Unrealistic expectations? We suggest tempering any Genesis Mission expectations. Like many of the EOs this year, the timeline imagined to execute the Genesis effort appears unrealistic to “dramatically accelerate scientific discovery” as suggested by the EO, in our opinion. Artificial intelligence research is generally ascribed to have formally originated at the Dartmouth Conference of 1956 organized by John McCarthy for which he coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” while some foundational thinking goes back to the 1930s with Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon, and Alan Turing’s research and the 1940s with Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, and Warren McCulloch/Walter Pitts’ inspirations for AI research. AI research works in year and decadal timescales, not months, especially within government bureaucracies. Quick breakthroughs have never been AI’s strength.
DOE warnings. Since early in the year, the administration, and the DOE has issued warnings of inadequate electricity infrastructure, warning of insufficient electricity grid reliability, electricity generation capacity, and a dramatic increase in U.S. blackout potential https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-releases-report-evaluating-us-gridreliability-and-security. While the EO and DOE suggest that the modernization and expansion of U.S. electricity generation and transmission capacity need to keep pace with AI innovation, physical infrastructure is not software, and does not work on the same timetable. Project development, permitting, construction, politics, and litigation work at a different pace in the physical world.
Much work yet to be done in infrastructure. The good news is that strong, and still accelerating investment in energy infrastructure will continue for many years, and has elevated the forward earnings expectations of utilities, electricity generators, and infrastructure contractors. The bad news is that electricity supplies will remain a constraint on AI deployments and other economic growth for at least the next 5-10 years. We have been talking for many years now about how U.S. utilities and other infrastructure-related industries that generate, produce, and deliver energy, and build related energy infrastructure have been greatly undervalued given the super-cycle of U.S. infrastructure investment required to service the evident energy demand growth in the U.S. from manufacturing, EV adoption, AI demand, and broad electrification trends in the economy. The earnings growth from increased energy demand and the associated infrastructure investment has elevated the EPS growth outlook for the associated industries to levels unprecedented for decades. We believe that the evident growth in these industries is still not fully reflected in their stocks, providing investors with attractive total return opportunities. We only worry about the pace of the realization of promised data center construction relative to both AI industry’s aggressive outlook and the current construction and utility industry constraints for providing the requisite power.
Bubble concerns. Investors in recent days are clearly re-evaluating the conversation about a possible AI/tech stock bubble. Investors may also be more concerned about relatively weak consumer confidence https://www.conference-board.org/topics/consumer-confidence/ and jobs data of late. In John Cassidy’s book dot.con, he outlines the phases of the creation of an investment bubble. It is difficult to say where we are in the AI investment theme today or how the Genesis Mission may reflect on the current theoretical bubble phase. Is the administration piling onto the AI speculation theme or is the Genesis Mission ultimately an enabler of the next phase AI research? AI may have made significant progress since Geoffrey Hinton’s group AlexNet victory in the 2012 ImageNet Challenge and the subsequent mass AI research effort to exploit big data, machine learning, backpropagation, and modern neural networks. However, despite Sam Altman’s cryptic tweets about nearing the singularity in January, AI development appears to have a long way to go to achieve the ultimate goal of AGI and to proliferate existing technology through the economy in the meantime. Some AI researchers still believe we are in the relatively early innings of AI development. In the meantime, the proliferation of narrow AI is merely beginning. The need for data centers and GPUs for AI training research and narrow AI commercialization does not appear likely to diminish in the foreseeable future as AI research progresses further. While some pockets of speculation may exist in tech and other AI theme stocks, the AI development story appears to have long legs. While we do have concerns that some hubris by the AI community has reappeared (and has existed since at least 1956), and AI industry grandiose promises of performance and/or the pace of realizing capital expenditures could lead to some temporary investor disappointment at some point, we expect any disruption in AI target realization to be brief and nothing like when AI research was nearly entirely government funded. That potential disruption certainly does not appear a near-term risk. We also have concerns for regulatory fatigue related to a massive infrastructure build-out and the potential for future stranded or temporarily under-utilized electricity and natural gas assets. However, the electrification trends, particularly EV adoption (with Model 3 prices well below the average U.S. car price and new solid state batteries on the foreseeable horizon), any electricity generation, storage, or transmission asset investments will be well-utilized over may years, in our view. We expect the AI investment theme, in both technology and utilities/energy/construction industries to remain operative indefinitely.
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