Disrupt 2026 Smart Stage Targets AI Power Bottleneck
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- TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will host the Smart Systems Stage October 13-15 at San Francisco's Moscone Center, with speakers from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion, Inertia, Bloom Energy, and more.
- Helion CEO David Kirtley and Commonwealth Fusion Systems CSO Brandon Sorbom will examine breakthroughs driving commercial fusion and the path to putting fusion power on the grid at scale.
- Jeff Lawson, the Twilio founder now leading fusion startup Inertia, will discuss how scaling Twilio shaped his approach to talent, timelines, and engineering challenges at one of the best-funded fusion power startups.
- A grid-modernization panel — featuring Drew Baglino (Heron Power) and Apoorv Bhargava (WeaveGrid) — will explore why electricity demand is outpacing infrastructure and where investment is flowing.
- A separate panel with Bloom Energy SVP Bill Thayer and Ambrosia Energy co-founder Sara Spangelo will focus on data center operators and energy companies racing to secure power before it bottlenecks AI's next wave.
- The article frames AI's power demand as a critical bottleneck for the industry, positioning the stage as a venue for founders and operators who need "the full picture — not just a headline and an LLM summary."
Why it matters: TechCrunch is putting its conference stamp on the narrative that compute, not capital, is now the limiting reagent for AI — giving founders across fusion, grid, and data center infrastructure a single venue to court the same investor pool chasing the energy-AI convergence ahead of Disrupt's pricing window closing.
