Founder Intro: Dr. Steve Huang on Building KiWi New Energy
KiWi New Energy founder Dr. Steve Huang tells the company's origin story — from his early years at Nvidia and two decades across solar manufacturing, silicon wafers, and microinverters, to the realization that the missing piece of the energy transition is not more hardware but an AI dispatch layer for the grid. He shares why KiWi starts from the demand side, how the company earned rare control-layer access to Tesla Powerwall in Taiwan, and the vision for scaling green power subscriptions across Asia and beyond.
In this founder introduction, Dr. Steve Huang shares why he started KiWi New Energy and the vision driving the company's AI-powered green energy platform.
He traces his path through the energy value chain: leaving Nvidia in 2005, a role at solar manufacturer Gintech, co-founding the silicon wafer company Danen Technology that later went public, and a self-funded microinverter startup that ultimately shut down after Huawei entered the market. KiWi, founded in May 2019, is his fourth startup — and the one shaped by everything that came before.
Huang explains the moment the company name was born: cutting open a kiwi after dinner in 2019, he saw the green flesh as renewable energy, the white core as solar power, the tiny black seeds as households across the grid, and the brown skin as the Earth. From that image came both a name and a thesis — the energy transition needs a system that connects all of these layers, not just more generation.
He explains why KiWi starts from the demand side rather than building more generation: every retail location, restaurant, and commercial site has its own consumption profile, and the system only dispatches power when and where it is actually needed. That demand-side intelligence, packaged as the AI Energy Operating System (AI-EDC), is what turns fragmented small and mid-sized buyers into a credible counterparty for renewable generators.
The video also covers how KiWi earned rare control-layer access to Tesla Powerwall through its FamilyMart rollout in Taiwan, how the platform scaled from a 10-store pilot to a target of 3,000 FamilyMart stores by 2026, and the role of blockchain-based green energy certification in making each kilowatt-hour auditable for RE100 and corporate decarbonization reporting.
Huang closes with where KiWi is heading next: deeper aggregation that lets mid-sized retailers and food service groups subscribe to green power "as easily as Netflix," expansion beyond Taiwan into Asia and Silicon Valley, and a long-term vision of an AI dispatch layer that helps the grid itself run cleaner, cheaper, and more resiliently.
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