Speakers
Education Session
Gabe Collins will present on a range of projects he's doing now that look at power and water use, the various parts of the property rights stack associated with datacenters and digital infrastructure, and emerging trends that may see datacenters used for training frontier AI models and those used for handling follow-on inference workloads evolve along potentially very different lines.
Gabriel Collins is the Baker Botts Fellow in Energy and Environmental Regulatory Affairs at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. At Baker, he co-heads the Program on Energy & Geopolitics in Eurasia. He is also a water-energy nexus thrust leader at Rice’s WaTER Institute and an Editor Emeritus at the Texas Water Journal.
Gabe’s research focuses on energy, food, water, and national security. His work is regularly published in high-impact outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Naval War College Review, and the Baker Institute itself. A full repository can be found at https://www.bakerinstitute.org/expert/gabriel-collins, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabecollins, and https://gabrielcollins.substack.com/.
Gabe received his B.A. from Princeton University and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. He was a member of the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute team and is still teased by his family for joining a commodity hedge fund right before the 2008 market crash. Gabe is a Permian Basin native, reads Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish well enough to use them in his research, speaks each just well enough to get himself in trouble, and is licensed to practice law in Texas.