Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Warns AI Could Lose 'Social Permission' If It Burns Energy Without Real-World Benefits In Health And Education

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella says artificial intelligence faces a test: prove it improves people's lives or risk losing public trust.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday in a wide-ranging discussion with BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) CEO Larry Fink, Nadella said AI's massive energy use will only be tolerated if it delivers tangible results in areas like health care, education and productivity.

“We will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens,” he said. “If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.”

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Nadella framed AI as the latest chapter in a long arc of computing, comparable to the internet, mobile technology and cloud computing. But he stressed that, unlike earlier technologies, AI's energy footprint makes accountability unavoidable.

Throughout the conversation, Nadella returned to the idea that AI must move beyond experimentation and hype. He described the technology as becoming foundational not just for companies, but for entire countries and societies. The challenge, he said, is making sure its benefits spread broadly instead of remaining concentrated among a few firms or regions.

Fink pressed Nadella on whether AI-driven productivity gains could come at the cost of jobs. Nadella acknowledged the fear but argued the bigger question is whether AI is used to expand human capability.

“Going and thinking of these as somehow living outside of the realm of human agency is probably not the right way to think about it,” Nadella said.

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He compared the moment to the early days of personal computing, when few imagined billions of people would use computers daily for knowledge work.

“In the early 80s, if somebody had come to us and said that four billion people are going to wake up every morning and start typing, you would have said ‘Why?'” Nadella said. “We have a typist tool that’s good enough we don’t need four billion people.”

“If you buy my entire argument that we've got a new commodity–it’s tokens–and the job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better,” he said.

That framing puts energy infrastructure at the center of the AI debate. Nadella said access to reliable power grids, data centers and energy storage will determine which countries benefit most from AI diffusion.

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This is where companies focused on energy innovation enter the picture. Startups like EnergyX are working on lithium extraction and battery technologies aimed at improving how energy is stored and delivered at scale. EnergyX is currently raising capital from individual investors, with minimum investments starting at $1,000, as it works to commercialize its lithium technologies.

As AI-driven data centers expand globally, advances in battery efficiency and energy storage are becoming a critical part of making that growth sustainable.

“All of these token factories are part of the real economy, connected to the grid, connected to the telco network,” Nadella said. “That's what's going to drive at scale, whether it's in the global south or in the developed world.”

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This article Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Warns AI Could Lose 'Social Permission' If It Burns Energy Without Real-World Benefits In Health And Education originally appeared on Benzinga.com