In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, host Stu Turley talks with Mikey Lucas, COO & Partner at MSB Global Services and Matrix Data Center, about the future of AI, data centers, and America’s energy dominance.
Mikey shares his journey from self-taught entrepreneur to leading a three-gigawatt data center project powering the AI boom. The discussion covers:
- Why data centers consume power equal to tens of thousands of homes
- The two biggest hurdles: financing and grid power
- How microgrids, nuclear, and behind-the-meter solutions can reshape the industry
- Investment opportunities with 15–20% returns
- Strain from EV adoption and natural gas demand
- America’s aging grid as a national security risk
- The urgent need for skilled labor
A mix of big-picture strategy and real-world solutions, this episode explores where AI, energy, and investment collide—and why skilled trades may fuel America’s next boom.
I am looking forward to more podcasts with Mikey as I learned a lot from our discussion, and loved his get-the-job-done attitude.
Connect with Mikey on his LinkedIn here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikey-lucas/
Book an Appointment with Mikey and tell him Stu sent you. here:https://site.msbglobalservices.com/mikey-consultation-call-30min
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
00:52 – AI as a Force for Good
02:23 – AI, Energy, and U.S. Dominance
03:02 – What Are Data Centers?
05:30 – Power & Financing: The Big Hurdles
08:56 – ERCOT, Texas, and Nuclear Prospects
10:33 – Investment Opportunities
12:04 – Returns & Infrastructure Funds
14:05 – Public Perception & Rising Bills
15:08 – The Real Problem: Utilities
18:44 – Businesses Must Rethink Energy
19:35 – The EV Strain on the Grid
21:16 – America’s Clean Advantage
23:46 – Solving Problems vs. Talking About Them
25:07 – How to Connect with Mikey
26:01 – Natural Gas Shortages Ahead?
28:43 – The Energy Supercycle
30:46 – The Skilled Labor Crisis
32:37 – Stu’s DIY Microgrid
34:32 – Hard Truths for the Next Generation
35:05 – Closing Thoughts
Key portions of the Transcript:
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:00:52] Yeah. So we’re, we’re in the process right now to further the large language model of AI to help humanity. And I know that that oftentimes gets to be bumper sticker and people kind of hear that a lot, but I was convinced that I could either sit on the background and watch it happen, or I can be a part of it being in my background, working for Elon Musk back in 2015, 2016, I knew I was like, Hey, he, he said that multiple times that he could be either a part the space race, or he could sit there and watch it, he could part of the renewable space. Could sit there and watch it. And I kind of take that into consideration with what I do. And as you know, all the news broadcasters, social media is saying, AI is bad, AI’s bad. And then there’s half of the people that say AI is good. I’m like, I’ve been using AI for four or five years. And I don’t have a technology background, but I am self-made, which basically means, or self-taught rather, you know, where obviously not to dilute what my mentors have taught me or people that have taught me like yourself. But I’ve had to learn things, I would say, the hard and long way. And with AI now, I’m able to learn the way that the style of how I learn. I’m able to learning significantly faster. I mean, I’ve been able to put in essentially a four-year engineering degree in about four months from AI. And so the goal with the Matrix Data Center is to have good people, which is what we need. We need more American patriots that are people running AI. Good people with money rather than letting, you know, the elephant in the room, which everybody knows, you know, the bad people with my, I’m not talking, you know, Republicans or Democrats. I’m talking about adversaries to the state of America.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:02:23] Oh absolutely, China and everything else. We’re very much in a huge battle. And as secretary Wright, who is one of the three energy dominance apocalypse horsemen, as I call him. You’ve got secretary Chris Wright and you got secretary Doug Burgum and you’ve got secretary Lee Zeldin leading the charge for energy dominance. We got to have energy dominance in order to be dominant in AI. But in your case, how are you handling a date building out a data center there’s there’s two big problems with the data center money and behind the meter in the grid hair you handling those two big.
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:03:02] Yeah, so that’s a gigantic topic in and of itself. So when it comes to data centers, I don’t think people really understand them. On layman terms, a data center is essentially the size of two Costco’s with, instead of, you know, toilet paper, waters, and chicken, you have racks of computers with tons of cooling and, you now, lighting and things like that in it, right, so it’s like layman’s terms. These things pull, an average data center will pull roughly 30 to 40,000 homes worth of power. And so the hard part about data centers is people don’t realize how much they’re using data centers on a daily basis. What we’re using right now, this recording platform is now hosted through a computer that’s hosted and powered in a data center. People’s cell phones, if you go on your cell phone and look back on all of your photos, go back to five years ago, Okay, all of that, it just magically pulls up. Well, where is that stored at? That’s stored in a computer, a supercomputer that’s powered and cooled in a space, in a shell somewhere here in the United States and your text messages, right? If you go back all the way back to all your text message with your wife and your mom and look at photos from two, five years ago. Those are all stored somewhere. They’re not just on the cell phone. There’s too much, there’s too much quote unquote data to store it on your cell phone, so it’s stored. And then, you know, like what people call the cloud. So they understand the cloud, so the, the big, the big issue is that I would say is people are using it more and more and more, right? So. I started noticing this about three years ago is when I’m working, because I work pretty much 24 seven between like seven and 10 PM, I started noticing my my internet service to get drained, like not as fast and I was like, what’s going on? Just use common sense. And I was, like, Oh, everyone’s streaming 4k YouTube or Netflix. So that’s why my internet’s going down. What the heck? And so people are actually using it more and more and more. They just don’t realize that. And the infrastructure behind that is through data center. So. We’re out here building data centers. They call it the AI gold rush. And right now there’s, yes, there’s there is two problems, power and financing. Now the good news is that the money has come back in the market. So there’s people knocking on my door, asking us to fund the project, which is great. And that’s phenomenal. That’s awesome. If this was three years ago, it would have been a little bit harder. And I know that because I run a private equity firm and you know, there is the zero banking alliance, which basically was run by the big three, State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock. And they basically said, there’s no money that’s gonna be invested into a dirty energy. So that was very hard for us to get money for those projects. But data centers, there’s a significant return on it, but I would say that today, right? This very second today, as we’re filming this, there’s probably in the ballpark of 15 to 20% of people And that’s being. That use AI, that use this. Now everyone uses, everyone’s, you know, grandma, grandpa to the little three-year-old kid uses some level of a data center with their videos on YouTube or their text messages. So they’re all using it, but now you have this AI. And there is a hard part that’s coming up that, yes, there’s conversations around, you know, productivity of people losing their jobs and stuff like that. But long story short, that’s kind of data centers in and of itself. The two major problems is, yes it is money. So. We’re not really seeing that as an example. We’ve got people knocking on our door. They just want to know the story, which is the key part is people think that they can just go buy land and put a data center on it. Well, it’s not, it doesn’t work like that. It’s not like, you know, you can’t just go by land and put, you now, a gigawatt data center on or even a 500 megawatt datacenter on it, which is again, a large, large data center, you know like, 30 or 40 Costco’s. You can’t do that because the hard part is the power. And so When I would go to these data center investment conferences or data center conferences, the room that was filled the most was, and people were not on their cell phones on LinkedIn or X or whatever, TikTok, they were watching was the power panels. And so that’s when I was like, I was, like, wait a second, I’ve been working on behind the meter power for the last over a decade now. Like I know the solution, we got this. And so, that’s, when I teamed up with Anishia as a consultant with MSB and then realized very quickly that I could work my way into the company and actually be a massive benefit, someone that has candy about it too, whatever it takes mindset to actually fulfill on what’s never been done before, which is a three gigawatt data center on one campus. So it’s very interesting, but the power solution essentially is right now is going to be, do you have grid power? And the answer is no. So if you were to go and buy land to go build a complex of houses, a master plan, you would need fiber, water, and power, right? Right. You know, it takes a very long time. I think that’s where the most people get stuck at is they think, oh, I’ve got this cheap land. I can just, you know, put a data center on it. It’s like, no, it’s like the same thing. It’s, like, well, you got to do feasibility studies. And so it’s the same as, like I got this cheap land in West Texas. I’m going to go drill a hole and extract the hydrocarbons out of it. It’s not necessarily, right? There’s some wildcatters out there. I’m sure people will appreciate that. But yeah, the main thing right now in Texas, the good part about Texas is that through Aircott, they seem to be on the front runner of wanting to be. The ones that attract all of the data centers. The hard part is that we are our own grid, which means we can’t import energy outside of Aircott. The power is about 90% of the utility grid, but it does seem that the regulators are pushing towards not just renewable, which is roughly 90% of the power that’s come on the Texas utility grid over the last couple of years in a row, but now looking more into nuclear, which we were talking to some nuclear companies today in the last. Months, hearing what they’re talking about. I know President Trump said the other day in Pennsylvania that he was going to permit a nuclear site in two weeks. And I was like, hey, what about our site? Like, you know, let’s do that. But yeah, I would love to know kind of what your listeners want to know specifics because I mean, I’m in the heat of it right now, Stu.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:08:56] This is cool. And I almost think, think very much that we need a series on a discussion on AI data center in Urquhart, because this is such a huge issue. I just interviewed Ron Gussock, the CEO of Liberty energy, and they create it as a oil and gas service providing company oil and gas goes up and down as the market goes. And they created behind the meter data center, creation, whole division with a flat line cashflow to offset that. What a brilliant plan. And so companies and, and entrepreneurs and leaders like yourself have a real plan and when I just interviewed the, the gentleman with the data center out in Abilene. That is an amazing story as well too. This is a, a gigantic topic and people want to find out about investments. Where do they make investments that they can get returns on because in renewable energy, the renewable energy returns have been less than 2% across the world and they’ve been losing money, so it’s actually been very abysmal. When you look at the returns in oil and gas, it has been tremendous. In fact, that’s what my day job is evaluating oil and gas deals. So is, you know, that I think is going to be some of the biggest questions you’re going to able to answer is how do I make money? How do you make money and that is how you get people invested in, in your company.
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:10:34] So we’re talking about roughly a $50 billion project. And so for the average investor, for the accredited investor, one of the ways they can do that is through specific funds, maybe infrastructure funds. Obviously they can go to American Energy Fund because American Energy fund is the one that’s partnered up with MSB. They can technically do that, but it’s not a typical retail. Investors. Some of the ways that they can make money right now is, and again, this is not financial advice, but I would definitely, I’m buying more NVIDIA, I am buying more Oracle stock, right? So like, to the typical investor, you could see a trend here that NVIDia… The semiconductor companies, they have their backlog orders for years. There’s gigawatts and soon to be terawatts of backlog in orders for those types of companies. If you’re the average American and you don’t necessarily have hundreds of thousands, if not multiple millions of dollars to invest, that is definitely something that I’m personally doing and staying. The hard part is there’s going to be a lot of those AI companies that are out there. You can find some startups, some seed capital kind of concepts. Be very, I would be very careful with those. But if you have the appetite for a riskier kind of venture, like an Uber back in the early 2000s or 2010s, but you know, great if you can find them. But.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:11:51] Really, it’s so if I was a, sorry, I didn’t rep, but if I was a accredited investor and wanted to reach out to you and say what kind of returns compared to the stock market would I get in your fun.
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:12:04] So our fund is, we just shoot for above alpha. So we’re looking for 15 to 20% returns on everything that we’re doing. That was the first three years. Prior, or now post those three years, we’ve moved into now powering data centers. So infrastructure. And with infrastructure, the returns are very lucrative, which is why there’s a lot of money being pushed into that. So infrastructure funds.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:12:27] You had me at very lucrative. Yeah.
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:12:28] Yeah, well, yeah, it’s the same for us. It’s essentially the same amount of work, the same amount of brain power. Yes, a few more, obviously, people on the team, but the problems in the pay are significantly more. And we’re still solving the same problem of sustainable energy future. It’s just that now, instead of talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, we’re talking in the billions of dollars sector now. So the returns in data centers or powering data centers, it is a utility. Who doesn’t pay their power bill? Especially when you have a tier one creditor like an Oracle in the US, Meta, Google, OpenAI, those types of companies, they pay their power bill. So the returns are astronomical. We don’t gouge their eyes out with Oracle’s not an idiot. They negotiate very, very well. They buy, essentially the program is they do what’s called a power purchase agreement. So they buy the power, buy the kilowatt, buy a watt at a specific rate for 20 to 40 years. You’re now investing, just like for me, I always knew for years, you know, when I was selling solar panels, like if I were to just take it, I’ve actually advised, you know, some people and advised, but kind of said, Hey, if you really want to pay off your solar panels faster, take the money, the $1,200 you’re saving on your residential solar panels that I just sold you and put that money into your Duke Energy or, you know, one of the power companies that you’re currently in, because they’re not only are they giving you dividends, but now you can turn that take that money and pay off your solar house. Faster because utilities, that’s the one, one of the main necessities that people will not turn off that they won’t pay their car bill, they’ll not pay their car build before they don’t pay their light bill. They won’t play their water bill before they don’t get a light bill they’ll pay their light bill
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:14:05] Oh yeah. Now data centers are getting a black eye in many different ways. And when you take a look at the back East with the, the government AI data centers, that the huge transmission lines that are coming in are adding in, like in Maryland and in New Jersey, they went from $600 a month on their power bill to $900 a month in the past few months. Because of the extra transmission lines that the government is having to put in. And I’m like going, that’s just not right. That’s kind of like data centers need to be behind the meter and budgeting in on their own things. That’s a keep. If you ever seen the movie, young Frankenstein, when all the villagers started wanting to burn down the place, just because of them. It’s like a Frankenstein movie. I mean, when you can imagine everybody all mad at the Frankenstein monster. And I don’t want to think as AI as a Frankensteine monster, but holy smokes Batman, people are going to get upset when they see their power bills go up.
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:15:08] Now, Stu, here’s the other side of the coin, is by no means am I sticking up for AI data centers in this position. You want to know who the real problem is? It’s the power companies. It’s last large scale monopoly that is out there. The aging infrastructure that we have is really, really bad. That’s one of the reasons why it wakes me up on a daily basis, because my passion is to have.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:15:31] I think you need about three or four more reallys in there because we’re the power poles you don’t know a
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:15:40] huge people don’t people don t see it because why they just turn the lights on the lights turn on and they’re like oh well I don’t have a problem well if you’ve been overseas which I’m sure you have there’s there’s not consistent power in and it takes it don’t get me wrong it takes a lot of money to maintain these lines and a lot of skilled workers to do that What really frustrates me the most, and I don’t want to open up too much of a can of worms, but I don’t care, I’ll stick up for the people. When I start to see C-suite executives getting bonused out tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a grid that is rising rates, that has all these rising rates and instability, to me that’s a problem. Because why are you getting paid so much money? And I get why they’re getting paid so much more because people are just paying the bill. The American people really don’t have a voice. Here’s what the power companies say, what are you going to do? Well, guess what? Guess what they can do. They can go buy some Tesla power walls in their own solar panels and finance them, and it will be cheaper than over a long period of time and right away. And they actually now have a choice. Not that we have to talk about solar panels, but if the American People actually want to stand up to the utility company, They go finance on a 20, 30-year loan. For some tier one solar panels and go get some Tesla power walls or whatever power, you know, whatever battery packs you want. And you’re not off the grid, but you’re now self-sufficient. And if you really want to stick it to the man, you can stick it to the men by creating your own power on site, which is the whole behind the meter concept and factor here, which within data centers, it’s the same issue because when you’re connected to the grid. So we have two problems here. So you have the end users, the hyperscalers, right? The Oracles, the Amazons and all these guys, right. They go, because of history, They go, we want power from the grid. And I tell them, well, you’re gonna be waiting in line for six to eight years if you want the scale of what you want. And so we’re going to create and bring in utility scale power to onsite or through a private use network, a PUN, and have a offsite power plant with our own transmission lines for your site. And that is the ultimate way of how to solve the problem. And it’s starting to, thankfully, through the news, and I know that the energy secretary and the president are talking about it currently today, like. If we’re going to be the leader in AI or even manufacturing and bring manufacturing back to America, people don’t realize how bad the utility grid actually is. It is a national security issue. It’s really, really, bad, let alone if a drunk person hits a transformer on the side, your whole neighborhood’s out. Think about that, but on steroids, a lot of them. It’s extremely bad. The only way to harden our grid is to spend tons and tons and or to have businesses and homeowners. Produce their own power on site. And now again, I’m not saying put up wind turbines in your backyard, but however ugly solar panels are, that’s fine. But if you really want to be an American and help out and do your part as an American citizen, put up solar on your house. And again, I’m saying you have to put it on the front of your house, whatever, but if you want to take a chunk out of this and do you part, that’s one way to help the grid. It’s bad, Stu, and you know that, really bad. I don’t got to convince you. You know how bad it is. And it’s very, very, very, very, very, very bad.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:18:44] I like the way you like it, Mikey. I’m just having a blast listening to you. So this is almost refreshing. I’ve been out here going as a business owner and as a, a, a businessman, you business CEOs need to look at their business model now differently than they did 10 years ago.
Mikey Lucas – COO & Partner @ MSB Global Services | Matrix Data Center [00:19:04] Correct.
Stuart Turley – CEO and President of Sandstone Group [00:19:04] You need to have a line item down here for energy. And if your business is energy dependent, you need to have your own power plant line item. Down here, it is no longer an option and distributed management and micro grids are going to be the defining factor of whether or not you’re in business or not. And you nailed it. I’m over here going, yay, way to go, man, rock on.