Billionaire Nikhil Kamath says THIS thing to be most valuable in next 5-10 years, not gold, silver, land or money, it is...

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has recently said something which suggests that in the coming times, cash, gold, silver, precious jewellery, or land will not be as valuable as this thing. He believes that in the coming 10 years, electrons and energy can become our currency. This is not just a thought but research based on the power consumption of rapidly growing data centers and artificial intelligence.

Talking about data centres, these are the places where your every online activity—whether it is watching Netflix or saving a file in the cloud—is processed. But each new data centre consumes as much electricity in a year as 4 lakh electric vehicles combined do not consume. This is the reason that 65% of the total cost of any data centre is spent only on electricity (computing and cooling).

The US has the highest number of 3,680 data centers in the world. This is followed by Germany (424) and the UK (418). India is in the 7th spot on this list with 262 data centres. As the number of servers increases, the electricity demand also increases. This is why research estimates that by 2030, data centres will consume 10% of the world's total electricity.

The research says that if only 5% of the world's internet searches are done with the help of AI, then the amount of electricity consumed by it will be enough to light 1 million Indian homes for a year. This is what highlights the real cost of AI, as Sam Altman of OpenAI said that even words such as "please" and "thank you" cost millions of dollars.

What does 'energy currency' mean?

According to Nikhil Kamat, if electricity has become the backbone of every digital activity—then why not give it the status of currency? Just imagine, just like companies hedge their currency to avoid fluctuations in the dollar or euro, in the future they can also start hedging electricity prices. This means that energy will also be traded as an 'asset'. Imagine if supermarkets or data centers trade kilowatt-hours, just like foreign exchange or bitcoins are traded today! In the future, perhaps blockchain-based 'energy tokens' can also come, which will allow the exchange of energy like a digital currency.

Will economic thinking change?

If this happens, then there can be a fundamental change in the country's economy. The parameters of inflation, the banking system and even the definition of 'value' will have to be understood afresh. In the future, wealth may not only be measured by money, but also by the energy credits you have.