Bill Gates: ‘Our grandchildren will grow up in a world that is dramatically worse off’ if we don’t fix climate change
Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates delivers his speech at the National Assembly on August 16, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea.
Pool | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The idea of becoming a grandparent is emotional for Bill Gates to even write about.
“I started looking at the world through a new lens recently — when my older daughter gave me the incredible news that I’ll become a grandfather next year,” Gates wrote in a letter published overnight on his personal blog, Gates Notes.
Gates’ 26-year-old daughter, Jennifer, and her husband, Nayel Nassar, are expecting their first baby in 2023.
“Simply typing that phrase, ‘I’ll become a grandfather next year,’ makes me emotional,” wrote the 67-year-old billionaire philanthropist, who earned his fortune from co-founding Microsoft in the 1970s. “And the thought gives a new dimension to my work. When I think about the world my grandchild will be born into, I’m more inspired than ever to help everyone’s children and grandchildren have a chance to survive and thrive.”
Gates goes on to summarize the work his namesake philanthropic organization, the Gates Foundation, is doing for children living in global poverty, to improve education, pandemic preparedness, and the fights against polio and AIDS.
Gates also talks about the work he is doing to combat climate change, both through the Gates Foundation by supporting early stage climate companies with his investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Current leaders’ response to climate change will impact future generations, which is the first point Gates makes in the section of his letter where he addresses climate change.
“I can sum up the solution to climate change in two sentences: We need to eliminate global emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050,” Gates writes. “Extreme weather is already causing more suffering, and if we don’t get to net-zero emissions, our grandchildren will grow up in a world that is dramatically worse off.”
Getting to zero will be the hardest thing humans have ever done.
Bill Gates
Co-founder of Microsoft, climate investor
The implications are enormous — and so is the challenge.
“Getting to zero will be the hardest thing humans have ever done,” Gates writes. “We need to revolutionize the entire physical economy — how we make things, move around, produce electricity, grow food, and stay warm and cool — in less than three decades.”
Gates got started in working on climate change when he learned about the struggles of small farmers in countries where his namesake philanthropic organization was doing work. The Gates Foundation funds climate adaptation work, helping people adjust to the implications of a warming world, where there is no profit to be made by a commercial enterprise.
“It starts from the idea that the poorest are suffering the most from climate change, but businesses don’t have a natural incentive to make tools that help them,” Gates writes.
“A seed company can earn profits from, say, a new type of tomato that’s a nicer shade of red and doesn’t bruise easily, but it has no incentive to make better strains of cassava that (a) survive floods and droughts and (b) are cheap enough for the world’s low-income farmers,” Gates writes. “The foundation’s role is to make sure that the poorest benefit from the same innovative skills that benefit richer countries.”
Not all of Gates’ climate work is philanthropic. Breakthrough Energy Ventures funds early stage companies that are working to build and grow companies to decarbonize various sectors of the economy. Building for-profit companies to address a problem that impacts the well-being of the global population may come across as unsavory from Gates, who already has a fortune to his name — $103.6 billion according to Forbes as of Monday.
But Gates says decarbonizing global industry is too large a problem even for his deep pockets.
“Philanthropy alone can’t eliminate greenhouse gases. Only markets and governments can achieve that kind of pace and scale,” Gates said. Any profits Gates makes on investments he makes in Breakthrough Energy companies will go back into climate work or into the philanthropic foundation, he said.
Plus, if companies working to address climate change can be self-sustaining, that will encourage other investors to put money into them.
“Companies need to be profitable so they can grow, keep running, and prove that there’s a market for their products,” Gates writes. “The profit incentive will attract other innovators, creating competition that will drive down the prices of zero-emissions inventions and have a meaningful impact on emissions from buildings.”
Greenhouse gas emissions still increasing
The bad news is that greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing.
“Unfortunately, on near-term goals, we’re falling short. Between 2021 and 2022, global emissions actually rose from 51 billion tons of carbon equivalents to 52 billion tons,” Gates writes.
On Monday, the secretary-general of the United Nations also underscored the grim reality of the current moment in climate change.
“We are still moving in the wrong direction,” António Guterres said Monday. “The global emissions gap is growing. The 1.5-degree goal is gasping for breath. National climate plans are falling woefully short.”
Despite the bleakness of the current climate moment, Gates is optimistic about the rising investment in decarbonization technologies.
“We’re much further along than I would have predicted a few years ago on getting companies to invest in zero-carbon breakthroughs,” Gates writes.
Public money for climate research and development has gone up by one-third since the 2015 Paris climate accord, and in the United States, laws passed this year will put $500 billion toward moving the U.S. energy infrastructure away from fossil fuel-based sources, according to Gates.
Private money is also going into climate technologies at a good clip. Venture capital firms have put $70 billion in clean energy startups in the past two years, Gates writes.
Mike Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, speaks at the Nasdaq headquarters in New York on March 28, 2025.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
CoreWeave shares fell about 6% in extended trading on Tuesday even as the provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure beat estimates for second-quarter revenue
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: Loss of 21 cents
- Revenue: $1.21 billion vs. $1.08 billion expected
Revenue more than tripled from $395.4 million a year earlier, CoreWeave said in a statement. The company registered a $290.5 million net loss, compared with a $323 million loss in second quarter of 2024. CoreWeave’s earnings per share figure wasn’t immediately comparable with estimates from LSEG.
CoreWeave’s operating margin shrank to 2% from 20% a year ago due primarily to $145 million in stock-based compensation costs. This is CoreWeave’s second quarter of full financial results as a public company following its IPO in March.
CoreWeave pointed to an expansion in business with OpenAI, a major client and investor. Also during the quarter, CoreWeave acquired Weights and Biases, a startup with software for monitoring AI models, for $1.4 billion.
In May, management touted 420% revenue growth, alongside widening losses and nearly $9 billion in debt. The stock still doubled anyway over the course of the next month.
CoreWeave shares became available on Nasdaq at the end of the first quarter, after the company sold 37.5 shares at $40 each, yielding $1.5 billion in proceeds. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was trading at $148.75 for a market cap of over $72 billion.
A CoreWeave data center project with up to 250 megawatts of capacity is set to be delivered in 2026, the company said in the statement.
Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
WATCH: Citi’s Tyler Radke’s bullish call on CoreWeave, upgraded to buy
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) invites Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to speak in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on “Investing in America” on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
The Trump administration is still working out the details of its 15% export tax on Nvidia and AMD and could bring deals of this kind to more companies, the White House’s Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
“Right now it stands with these two companies. Perhaps it could expand in the future to other companies,” said Leavitt, the White House’s spokesperson.
“The legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce, and I would defer you to them for any further details on how it will actually be implemented,” she continued.
President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he had negotiated a deal with Nvidia in which the U.S. government approves export licenses for the China-specific H20 AI chip in exchange for a 15% cut of revenue. Advanced Micro Devices also got licenses approved in exchange for a proportion of its China sales, the White House confirmed.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release,'” Trump said Monday.
“We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets,” Nvidia said in a statement this week.
Trump said the export licenses for AMD and Nvidia were a done deal. But lawyers and experts who follow trade have warned that Trump’s deal may be complicated because of existing laws that regulate how the government can charge fees for export licenses.
The Commerce Department didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The H20 is Nvidia’s Chinese-specific chip that is slowed down on purpose to comply with U.S. export relations. It’s related to the H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S., and was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on artificial intelligence chips in 2023.
Earlier this year, Nvidia said that it was on track to sell more than $8 billion worth of H20 chips in a single quarter before the Trump administration in April said that it would require a license to export the chip.
Trump signaled in July that he was likely to approve export licenses for the chip after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the White House.
The U.S. regulates AI chips like those made by Nvidia for national security reasons, saying that they could be used by the Chinese government to leapfrog U.S. capabilities in AI, or they could be used by the Chinese military or linked groups.
The Chinese government has been encouraging local companies in recent weeks to avoid using Nvidia’s H20 chips for any government or national security-related work, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
WATCH: Access to Nvidia’s H20 won’t hand China an AI advantage: Analyst
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum attend the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
China has told companies to refrain from using Nvidia‘s H20 chips after the chipmaker recently received approval to resume shipping the less advanced artificial intelligence product, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Authorities have recently told companies to avoid using the Nvidia chips, or those from Advanced Micro Devices, for government and national security use cases, according to the news outlet.
The report comes after the White House confirmed on Monday that both Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give 15% of all China revenues to the U.S. government.
Last month, both companies said they would soon resume China shipments after the administration started requiring export licenses earlier this year. Both Nvidia’s H20 chip and AMD’s MI380 were created to work around previous AI chip restrictions to China due to national security fears.
Shares of both stocks teetered on Tuesday.
During a press conference Monday, Trump called Nvidia’s H20 chip “obsolete” and said he wouldn’t allow the higher-end Blackwell shipments there without 30% to 50% decrease in performance.
China is a key market for AI chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD.
Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said getting pushed out of the China market would be a “tremendous loss” for the company. He estimated the country’s AI market will hit $50 billion over the next two to three years.
Over the weekend, a social media account connected to Chinese state media said that the H20 chips were not “safe.”
One-day stock chart of Nvidia and AMD.
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