Tony Robbins can sound almost archaic when discussing money. He doesn’t offer you a stock ticker. A coal plant in West Virginia and a wager that he now refers to as the best financial choice of his life are mentioned somewhere in the middle of his story, which he tells with his hands moving the entire time. It’s the kind of assertion that raises an eyebrow. In the midst of an AI gold rush, a coal plant?
The Pleasants Power Station was headed toward permanent closure back in 2022. Robbins invested about $200 million in the clean energy company Omnis, acquiring a 50% share. The initial concept was nearly idealistic: convert coal into hydrogen, produce cleaner electricity, and preserve a few hundred local jobs in a county that needed them. At the time, the majority of investors were preoccupied with chips and software. He was examining the electrical grid. Listening to him gives me the impression that the energy angle was more important to him than the chemistry.
The interesting part was that instinct. The International Energy Agency projects that as AI infrastructure grows, data center electricity demand will double by 2030. Expected businesses like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are now rushing to secure power by entering into contracts for nuclear and renewable energy. Robbins was there two years ahead of schedule, for whatever reason. “I saw what was happening with AI coming and the need for data centers,” he said to The Iced Coffee Hour hosts. He described the return on the investment as “ridiculous.”
It’s more difficult to determine whether that is actually true. At the Milken Institute conference this spring, he acknowledged that the hydrogen technology is still in its infancy. He is changing course, working with the Hunt brothers to build a data center next to the plant and expand it on natural gas. Compared to the clean-energy narrative he began with, the picture is more disorganized. In 2024, a Wall Street Journal investigation raised serious concerns about whether the initial “quantum reformer” process ever performed as intended. To his credit, Robbins has consistently presented it as a risky wager that he might lose completely.
However, it’s difficult to ignore the pattern. Instead of focusing on the technology itself, he consistently chooses the unglamorous layer beneath it. The land, the power, the infrastructure beneath the fingernails. Additionally, he is hedging in other areas, such as AI-powered agricultural technology and, most recently, a shift into something much softer.
The Path, an AI therapy app he co-founded with two former Calm executives, is that softer wager. Prime Movers Lab led the $14.3 million seed funding round in May 2026. The pitch is unique: a “anti-validation” assistant that draws from cognitive-behavioral and other clinical frameworks and is designed to challenge users rather than flatter them. In a statement, Robbins said, “Too many people disappear in the gap between hitting rock bottom and getting real help.” It seems both logical and a little awkward to incorporate his methods into an app, coming from a man who built an empire on stages and seminars.
What about the returns? He told me that he was genuinely full of energy. The initial promise remains unfulfilled. It’s evident that Robbins didn’t wait for a consensus. Seldom does he.
