Ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Back — and He’s Chasing Power, Water, and AI Compute

With a resume that makes Silicon Valley sound clean, Eric Schmidt has worked at Princeton, Berkeley, Sun, Novell, and Google, where he helped transform a fast search engine into a business that could easily absorb entire industries. However, “ex Google CEO” is beginning to seem like the least intriguing title he has ever worn. These days, he’s criticizing American tech workers for becoming overly comfortable, pushing into space manufacturing, and talking about electricity like it’s oxygen. He might just be stating aloud what many executives whisper in private: apps won’t win the next era. The infrastructure will win.

One image comes to mind: a section of West Texas where the land runs flat until it doesn’t, where the horizon appears to have been scrubbed clean, and where “power” is a limitation rather than a metaphor.

Schmidt is currently involved with a business called Bolt Data & Energy, which is presenting hyperscalers with a one-stop-shop solution that combines water, power, and land for enormous data center campuses. According to Fortune, Bolt raised $150 million in its first round of funding, which included a $50 million investment from Texas Pacific Land. Words like “right of first refusal” and “water rights” sound dull until you consider how thirsty data centers are.

It’s not a subtle wager. Bolt is promoting a longer-term shift to cleaner energy sources, with nuclear being suggested as a potential component of the mix, while capitalizing on West Texas’s natural gas resources. With server halls and substations humming behind chain-link fences in place of railroads and oil rigs, it reads like a contemporary frontier tale. Schmidt seems to be attempting to catch the bottleneck. “Ideas” are no longer the bottleneck in AI. It’s power generation, grid capacity, and cooling—plus the politics of building anything large in America.

Schmidt worked for a company that profited from abstraction for years, so this is where the “ex Google CEO” framing comes into play. It felt weightless to search. The advertisements seemed digital. Clean user interfaces were used to conceal the industrial side of cloud computing.

He’s now diving right into the tangled physical layer, where geology and spreadsheets collide in areas like water access, energy inputs, and land deals. Due in part to the fact that everyone can see the same trend line—bigger models, bigger compute, bigger bills—investors appear to think this is where value will grow next. It’s still unclear, though, if regulators and communities will accept the scale required by the AI race.

Additionally, Schmidt’s rhetoric has become more incisive, at times uncomfortable. He blasted remote work as a hindrance to learning and competitiveness in late 2025 and cautioned that competing with China’s rigorous work culture might require sacrificing the concept of “work-life balance.”

Depending on where you sit, that type of talk can sound different to different people. For engineers who are burned out, it may sound like a penthouse morale boost, while for executives who are nervous, it may sound like permission. It seems as though Schmidt is attempting to rewrite the tech industry’s social contract by emphasizing urgency over comfort, even though he is well aware that it is easier to demand urgency than to live with it.

Then there’s room. After purchasing a majority stake in Relativity Space, Schmidt assumed the role of CEO, entering one of the world’s most capital-hungry industries: creating rockets that are predicted to work the first time, despite physics’ long history of degrading self-assured individuals.

Although it omits a crucial detail, reports presented it as a Big Tech-to-space move in the vein of Musk and Bezos. Rocket companies can burn money more quickly than most tech founders can raise it. Schmidt will be evaluated on launch cadence and execution rather than vision statements if he is sincere about scaling Relativity.

When you put the pieces together—a rocket factory in Long Beach, labor intensity warnings, and AI data centers in Texas—a pattern becomes apparent. Schmidt appears to be drawn to situations where “soft power” isn’t very helpful. PR won’t get you into megawatts. You can’t get a working engine by tweeting. He may have a preference for strict limitations because, having run Google for years, he is aware of what happens when a platform grows too large to be romantic. It turns into a logistics problem. It turns into systems.

Because it’s the simplest abbreviation, people still refer to him as the former Google CEO. What he is currently attempting to construct and what he believes the rest of the industry is lacking, however, may be the more telling question. He might think that the most ostentatious labs or the most flamboyant founders won’t be the next winners. The inputs—land, energy, water, factories, and time—will be silently locked down by them. Furthermore, that theory no longer seems strange in 2026. It has a map-like sound.