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AI Bottleneck isn’t chips or power. It’s human to wire the grid — and Condoit wants to make them the heroes.
If AGI shows up, but power drops in a data center, did anything really ship?
We talk about AI like it lives in the cloud, but the cloud lives in a very real, very dusty electrical room. Most of those rooms are undocumented, half-forgotten, and held together by tribal knowledge and Sharpie on breaker doors.
In this CLIMB episode, I sat down with Ian Hoppe, a former electrician turned founder of Condoit. He spent a decade pulling cables and wiring panels before deciding the electrical world needed a purpose-built data layer, not just a pretty BIM model that no one cares to update.
The Big Idea: The Grid Has a Knowledge Problem
Everyone is worried about GPUs, transmission, and power generation. Yes, these matter. But Ian’s point is simpler: We don’t actually know how electricity moves inside most buildings.
There are millions of commercial buildings in the U.S. with no reliable record of how they’re wired. The “system of record” is usually a retired electrician named Bob and a pile of half-wrong single-lines in a drawer. If Bob gets hit by a bus or decides he’s retiring to the Florida Keys, a lot of critical infrastructure ends up taking days to re-map or just operates on vibes.
Condoit is trying to fix that by becoming the source of truth for electrical systems — the Bloomberg terminal for what’s feeding what.
Key Takeaways
Downtime is a six-figure problem, not a minor inconvenience.
When something fails in a data center or hospital, the first 30–60 minutes are often spent playing “where does this wire go?” That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour in downtime or worse, lives lost, while electricans trace circuits like it’s still 1975.
We’re short ~81,000 electricians a year — and training new ones is slow.
It takes 4–5 years and thousands of hours to turn an apprentice into a journeyman. At the same time, demand is exploding from AI data centers, EV charging, and electrification. Tools like Condoit don’t replace electricians; they let the existing ones stop wasting time reverse-engineering bad or missing documentation.
From Bob’s brain to a shared, living map.
Condoit lets contractors tag every asset — panels, switchboards, chillers — and capture how they’re connected. Scan a QR code in the field, see what this device feeds and what feeds it. Less “where the hell is this coming from?” and more “here’s the map to the problem. Let’s go fix it.”
Not another digital twin — a revenue engine.
By digitizing facilities, contractors unlock recurring revenue: maintenance, compliance, upgrades, and infrared inspections that used to live in monster Word reports. Condoit gives them workflows and a network to actually turn that data into more jobs.
If you care about the rapid growth of AI, US energy dominance, climate change, or keeping distribution hubs, hospitals, and data centers online 24/7, this convo is absolutely worth a listen.
Check out the full CLIMB episode with Ian Hoppe of Condoit and see why the future of AGI might depend less on H100s and more on the 100-year old electrician who actually knows where the power from main breaker goes.
