January 29, 2025
January 29, 2025
5YF Episode #29: Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin
Floating Data Centers, Decarbonized Compute, New AGI Infrastructure, Foundation Models for Molecules, and the Future of Material Science w/ Orbital Materials CEO, Jonathan Godwin
5 year frontier
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Future of Materials: AI Designed Atoms
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Today, we dive into the future of discovering, designing, and deploying new breakthrough materials leveraging AI.
It's not an innovation until you've figured out how to make it at scale
Material science is on the brink of a revolution, fueled by AI and computational breakthroughs. At the helm of this transformation is Orbital Materials and its CEO, Jonathan Godwin, who are pioneering new ways to design and deploy advanced materials that could reshape industries from energy to aerospace. Their bold approach combines AI-driven design with real-world scalability, unlocking innovations that were once unimaginable.
In the next five years, the future will be defined by AI-designed materials that grant humanity unprecedented control over the physical world, data centers that resemble biological systems, and hybrid materials inspired by nature. These advancements promise not only to transform industries but to fundamentally change how we build, power, and interact with the world around us.
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My 5 Year Outlook:
- Foundation Models That Can Manipulate The Physical World: AI that understands the periodic table and simulates the world of atoms.
- Data Centers Start Resembling Biological Systems: Chips submerged in liquid vats and vast array of connective tissues.
- Hybrid Materials Will Merge Biology And Material Science: Elegance in natures design merge the biological with the physical.
Curious? Read on as I unpack each below 👇🏼
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Foundation Models That Can Manipulate The Physical World
A foundation model for material science stretches across the period table, across different type of materials, semiconductors, catalysts, even protein and biomaterials
Foundation models for materials science, like Orbital Materials’ Orb, will redefine innovation across industries. These models, trained on the entire periodic table and vast datasets of material interactions, have a valuable compounding capability: the more experiments and simulations that are run, the smarter and more accurate they become. This feedback loop will revolutionize humanity’s ability to predict, simulate, and design entirely new materials in silico, enabling scientists to manipulate atoms and molecules with extraordinary precision. Instead of focusing on single-use materials, these tools will empower the creation of versatile, purpose-optimized variants—from hyper-efficient solar panels to medical implants tailored to individual patients.
By simulating atomic interactions digitally, material development will become as agile and iterative as software engineering. Imagine crafting virtual prototypes of materials that don’t yet exist, testing their performance under varying conditions, and optimizing them—all without entering a lab. This unprecedented control will not only revolutionize industries such as energy, transportation, and electronics but also give humanity a greater command over the physical world. The potential applications are boundless, from self-cleaning surfaces to climate-resilient infrastructure, paving the way for solutions to challenges we can only dream of today.
By 2030, this AI-driven approach could reduce material development timelines by 80-90%, unlocking transformative breakthroughs in semiconductors, batteries, and carbon capture. Moreover, open-source models like Orb will democratize access to these innovations, empowering a global community of researchers to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges collaboratively.
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Jonathan Godwin, CEO of Orbital Materials
Orbital Materials is a material sciences company that leverages AI to discovery and design of advanced materials, particularly for clean energy, carbon capture, and data center applications. Founded in 2022 out of London, Orbital have raised over $20M in funding from the likes of Radical Ventures, Nvidia, and Toyota. They have already developed the world fastest and most accurate AI model for simulating advanced materials, including their own proprietary foundation model. The startup has also entered a multi-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop new data center decarbonization and efficiency technologies.
CEO Jonathan Godwin's impressive background includes a tenure as a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, where he honed his expertise in artificial intelligence. He holds advanced degrees in physics and computational sciences, with a degree from University College London.
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Data Centers Start Resembling Biological Systems
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Future data centers will look dramatically different to day’s mass of electronics. If built for Earth, large-scale data center campuses may integrate small modular nuclear reactors, providing abundant, reliable energy tailored to the growing demands of AGI workloads. These reactors will address energy scarcity while aligning with global decarbonization goals. Meanwhile, the first orbital data centers could emerge in space, leveraging the vacuum environment for efficient cooling and solar power for sustainable energy. These extraterrestrial facilities will drive innovation in material science, requiring cutting-edge thermal management systems and radiation-resistant materials to thrive in extreme conditions.
What you'll visually see is these massive vats, these baths. They will have dunked all of the different chips into it and they’ll be bubbling.
Visually, data centers will evolve from mechanical to biological-inspired designs. Traditional racks and fans will be replaced by transparent vats filled with viscous, bubbling liquid, engineered for exceptional thermal conductivity. Chips will be fully immersed in this liquid, with phase-change cooling fluids efficiently dissipating heat. Walking through these facilities might feel like entering a futuristic lab, with interconnected liquid baths and intricate wiring networks resembling the neural pathways of a brain. These advancements won’t just reduce costs—they’ll enable AGI to scale dramatically, allowing for larger, more energy-efficient training simulations and unlocking the next wave of computational breakthroughs.
Hybrid Materials Will Merge Biology And Material Science
The convergence of biology and material science will emerge as one of the most groundbreaking frontiers over the next five years. Advances in AI and computational tools are unraveling problems once deemed unsolvable, such as modeling interactions between metals and proteins. Orbital Materials’ pioneering work with hybrid materials highlights the transformative potential of combining biological precision with the robustness of traditional materials. This fusion could unlock innovations like bio-inspired electronics, self-healing infrastructure, and bio-friendly sensors that seamlessly integrate into our lives.
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Imagine a building material that mimics the regenerative properties of bone—able to detect micro-cracks and autonomously repair itself before structural integrity is threatened. Such materials could revolutionize infrastructure, drastically reducing maintenance costs while improving safety in critical environments like skyscrapers, bridges, and space habitats. These intelligent materials would represent a monumental leap in how we build and sustain the physical world.
Another compelling application is wearable technology that feels alive. Envision a flexible, skin-like fabric embedded with sensors capable of monitoring vital signs, adapting its temperature for comfort, and even self-healing small tears. This innovation would transform industries such as healthcare, athletics, and defense. Enabled by AI-driven design, these hybrid materials will be developed faster than ever, as computational models decode the molecular intricacies of biological systems. This fusion of biology and material science promises to blur the boundaries between the synthetic and the organic, redefining the products we use and the world we inhabit.
The AI-led era of material science is enabling the physical world to not only keep pace with but also power the revolutionary transformations of our digital age.
Here’s to building the impossible!
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