20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Will Build Their Own Chips | NVIDIA Will Be Worth $10TRN | How to Solve the Energy Required for AI... Nuclear | Why China is Behind the US in the Race for AGI with Jonathan Ross, Groq Founder
Episode
81 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Investing, Startups, Fundraising & VC
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Compute Supply Constraint: If OpenAI or Anthropic received double their current inference compute capacity, their revenue would nearly double within one month because rate limits currently restrict customer access. Demand for AI compute remains completely unsatisfied across the industry today.
- ✓Energy Geopolitics: Countries controlling compute will control AI, and compute requires energy. Norway alone could match entire US energy capacity by deploying five times its hydro capacity in wind turbines with 80% utilization rates. Europe must locate compute where energy is cheap to compete.
- ✓Hardware Economics: NVIDIA maintains monopsony control over HBM memory supply, requiring two-year advance orders for GPUs. Groq delivers chips in six months versus eighteen-month advantage. Supply chain speed matters more than chip performance when customers face compute shortages driving purchasing decisions.
- ✓Chip Amortization Reality: Standard five-year chip amortization periods are too long. Groq uses three-year cycles internally because newer chips will make older ones unprofitable to operate below operating costs. H100s remain profitable only because compute scarcity persists, not inherent value retention over time.
- ✓AI Economic Impact: AI creates deflationary pressure reducing costs across supply chains, causing people to work fewer hours and retire earlier while creating entirely new job categories. This adds labor capacity to economy through compute, unprecedented in economic history, preventing labor shortages despite automation fears.
What It Covers
Jonathan Ross, Groq founder and former Google TPU architect, explains why compute demand is insatiable, NVIDIA will reach $10 trillion valuation, nuclear energy solves AI infrastructure needs, and China lags The US in AGI development.
Key Questions Answered
- •Compute Supply Constraint: If OpenAI or Anthropic received double their current inference compute capacity, their revenue would nearly double within one month because rate limits currently restrict customer access. Demand for AI compute remains completely unsatisfied across the industry today.
- •Energy Geopolitics: Countries controlling compute will control AI, and compute requires energy. Norway alone could match entire US energy capacity by deploying five times its hydro capacity in wind turbines with 80% utilization rates. Europe must locate compute where energy is cheap to compete.
- •Hardware Economics: NVIDIA maintains monopsony control over HBM memory supply, requiring two-year advance orders for GPUs. Groq delivers chips in six months versus eighteen-month advantage. Supply chain speed matters more than chip performance when customers face compute shortages driving purchasing decisions.
- •Chip Amortization Reality: Standard five-year chip amortization periods are too long. Groq uses three-year cycles internally because newer chips will make older ones unprofitable to operate below operating costs. H100s remain profitable only because compute scarcity persists, not inherent value retention over time.
- •AI Economic Impact: AI creates deflationary pressure reducing costs across supply chains, causing people to work fewer hours and retire earlier while creating entirely new job categories. This adds labor capacity to economy through compute, unprecedented in economic history, preventing labor shortages despite automation fears.
Notable Moment
Ross reveals Groq engineers completed a customer-requested feature in four hours using only AI prompting without writing a single line of code or debugging. He projects this timeline will shrink to completion before customer meetings end, fundamentally changing competitive dynamics in software development.
Episode Transcript
The countries that control compute will control AI. And you cannot have compute without energy. And now we're going to be able to add more labor to the economy by producing more compute and better AI. That has never happened in the history of the economy before. What is that gonna do? I personally would be surprised if in five years Nvidia wasn't worth 10,000,000,000,000. The demand for compute is insatiable. If OpenAI were given twice the inference compute that they have today, if Anthropic was given twice the inference compute that they have today, within one month from now, their revenue would almost double. This is 20 v c with me, Harry Stebbings and this guest holds the record for the most downloads in last year's catalog of episodes. So I'm thrilled to welcome Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Grok back to the hot seat. Now, Grok is the AI chip company redefining inference at scale. Under his leadership, Grok has raised over $3,000,000,000 with the latest pricing the company at close to $7,000,000,000. And before Grok, Jonathan led the team that built out the TPU at Google, making him one of the leading architects of modern AI hardware. Now this conversation has it all with everything from OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, to what happens to NVIDIA in the next ten years, to how should we think about China. This was an incredible and very wide ranging discussion. But before we dive into the show today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data, and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products, and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coda Brain, is a game changer. Powered by Grammarly, Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. Whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble or an enterprise organization looking for better alignment, Coda matches your working style. Its seamless workspace connects to hundreds of your favorite tools including Salesforce, Jira, Asana, and Figma, helping your teams transform their rituals and do more faster. Head over to coda.io/20vc right now and get six months off the team plan for startups for free. That's coda, coda,.io/20vc and get six months off the team plan for free, coda.io/20vc. And talking about precision, that's exactly what Brex brings to your finances. So So when Brex was founded, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It was about solving the really gritty challenges that founders face daily. Let's be honest. Building something from the ground up is hard enough without dealing with …
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“If OpenAI or Anthropic received double their current inference compute capacity, their revenue would nearly double within one month because rate limits currently restrict customer access.”
“If OpenAI or Anthropic received double their current inference compute capacity, their revenue would nearly double within one month because rate limits currently restrict customer access.”
“NVIDIA maintains monopsony control over HBM memory supply, requiring two-year advance orders for GPUs.”
- GroqBy guest
“Groq delivers chips in six months versus eighteen-month advantage. Supply chain speed matters more than chip performance when customers face compute shortages driving purchasing decisions.”
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