EIF Speaker Series: “Bitcoin Is Becoming Increasingly Boring” with Lisa Hough
The AI infrastructure boom is often described in terms of models, chips and data center campuses. Lisa Hough sees a more foundational issue underneath it: economic security is national security.
As a board director at Big Digital Energy, Hough works across energy infrastructure, AI and data centers — sectors that are increasingly converging as power availability becomes a strategic constraint for the next phase of digital infrastructure.
This conversation is part of TheEnergyMag’s EIF Speaker Series, which features speakers attending the Energy Investors Forum and their views on the macro questions defining the next investment cycle across energy, AI infrastructure, data centers and bitcoin mining.
Hough’s answers point to a market where the next decade may be less about software alone and more about the physical systems that make software useful: generation, transmission, permitting, flexible demand and the ability to turn electrons into economic output. Her thesis is direct: AI may look like a software business, but its bottlenecks are increasingly rooted in land, energy and infrastructure.
Below is the full Q&A with Lisa Hough, board director at Big Digital Energy.
Q: Where would you invest $10,000 right now? Pick one each for high beta, low beta and negative beta.
NFA! [Not financial advice!]
High beta: Small-cap power infrastructure developers with real megawatts. The market still values AI chips more highly than the electrons they require.
Low beta: Bitcoin. Not because it’s exciting, but because it’s becoming increasingly boring: a globally liquid, scarce monetary asset with no management team and no quarterly earnings call.
Negative beta: Cash. Optionality is an asset.
Q: What’s a contrarian bet on the AI future?
The winners won’t be the models. They’ll be whoever can reliably deliver 24/7 firm power, water, transmission rights, and community support. The market is obsessed with intelligence and underestimates infrastructure. AI is ultimately a land, energy, and permitting business disguised as a software business.
Q: What comes after the AI buildout?
The optimization era.
Everyone is racing to build capacity. The next decade belongs to whoever can make existing infrastructure 20% more productive. That means grid orchestration, flexible loads, autonomous industrial systems, energy-aware computing, and AI managing physical infrastructure instead of just generating text.
The real story shifts from “more GPUs” to “more output per megawatt.”
Q: Does bitcoin have a future?
Bitcoin already won its category.
The interesting question isn’t whether Bitcoin survives. It’s whether institutions, sovereigns, utilities, and corporations finish repricing it from a speculative asset into strategic infrastructure.
It monetizes stranded energy, provides a buyer of last resort, and offers globally neutral collateral in a world that increasingly values scarce physical resources.
Q: How does the US break its energy bottleneck?
Stop pretending it’s one problem.
It’s five: generation, transmission, permitting, markets, and flexible demand.
Build everything—gas, nuclear, geothermal, solar, and storage. Treat new transmission like interstate highways, not local zoning disputes. Reward reliability and speed, not paperwork.
The last decade rewarded software.
The next decade rewards physics. The companies and countries that can produce, move, and monetize electrons will have an advantage that no large language model can replicate.
Hough will join other energy, compute and infrastructure leaders at the Energy Investors Forum, where these questions — how AI gets powered, how energy systems are financed, and how bitcoin fits into the next phase of infrastructure — will be part of the broader discussion.
Join EIF to hear more from Hough and other speakers on how the next wave of energy and digital infrastructure will be built, optimized and valued.
