YouSaid · the spoken record

Gavin Baker

lines on the record: 115
first: 2025-12-09
most recent: 2025-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Okay, well, there's one in Cambridge, and I wanted to beat one of them, never beat one of them. I've never been good at anything. I thought I would be good at this. And the idea of being good at something other than taking a test that was competitive was very appealing to me. And so I think that's been a really important thing too. And to this day, this is the only thing I'm good at. I'd love to be good at something else. I'm just not.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every sports team. Like, I love to ski. I've literally spent a small fortune on private skiing lessons. I'm not that good of a skier. I like to play pigpong. All my friends could beat me. I tried to get really good at chess, and this was before you actually had to play the games. And my goal was to beat one of the people. I'm sure there's a park somewhere.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great book, Why Stocks Go Up and Down. Then I went back to school. I changed my majors from English and History to history and economics. And I never looked back. And it consumed. Like I continued to really focus on climbing. But like instead of like, I would be in the gym and I would print out everything that the people on the Motley Fool wrote. They had these fools. They were early to talking about return on invested capital. Incremental ROIC is like a really important indicator. And I would just read it and I would underline it and I'd read books and then I'd read the Wall Street Journal. And then eventually there was a computer terminal finally set up near the gym and I'd go to that gym and just read news about stocks. And it was the most important thing in my life. And like I barely kept my grades up. And yeah, that's how I got into it. History, current events, skill and chance. And I am a competitive person. And I've actually never been good at anything else. Okay. I got picked last forever.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really appealed to me, and the way you got an edge in this greatest game of skill enchants imaginable was you had the most thorough knowledge possible of history and you intersected that with the most accurate understanding of current events in the world to form a differential opinion on what was going to happen next in this game of skill and chance, which stock is mispriced in the peri-mutual system that is the stock market. And that was like day three. I went to the bookstore and I bought like the books that they had, which were Peter Lynch's books. I read those books in like two days. I'm a very fast reader. Then I read all these books about Warren Buffett. Then I read Market Wizards. Then I read Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders. This is like during my internship. Then I read Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders again. Then I taught myself accounting.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DLJ. My job was to every time DLJ published a research report, it was in like the private wealth management division. And I worked for the guy who ran the office. And my job was whenever they produced a piece of research, I would go through and look at which of his clients owned that stock. Then I would mail it to the clients. So this day we wrote on General Electric. So I need to mail the GE report to these 30 people, mail the Cisco report to these 20 people, and then I started like reading reports. And I was like, oh my God, this is like the most interesting thing imaginable. So investing, I kind of conceptualized it. It's a game of skill and chance, kind of like poker. And, you know, there's obviously chance at investing. Like if you're an investor in a company and a meteor hits their headquarters, that's bad luck. But like you own that outcome. So there is chance that is irreducible. But there's skill too.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my parents were lawyers. You know, they'd done reasonably well. They both grew up in, I would say, very economically disadvantaged circumstances. Like my dad talks about like he remembers every person who bought him a beer. He couldn't afford to be a beer. He worked the whole way through college. He was there on a scholarship. He had one pair of shoes all through high school. And so they were super on board with this plan. And I'd been very lucky. They sent me to college and I didn't have to pay for college. So they said, you know, Gavin, we think this plan of being skib, river rafty guide, wildlife photographer, climbing the shoulder seasons, trying to write it all. But we think it sounds like a great plan. But, you know, we've never asked you for anything. We haven't encouraged you to study anything. We've supported you in everything you've wanted to do. Will you please get one professional internship? Just one. And we don't care what it is. The only internship I could get, this was at the end of my sophomore summer at Dartmouth. It was an internship with Donaldson Lufkin and Jin Red.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was my plan. This was like my plan of record. I was really lucky. My parents were very supportive of everything I wanted to do. My parents had very strict parents. So of course they're extremely permissive with me. So, you know, I'll probably end up being a strict parent. You know, just the cycle continues.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being nice is free. But anyways, I was going to be a ski bum in the winters. I was going to work on a river in the summers. And that was how I was going to support myself. And then I was going to climb in the shoulder seasons. I was going to try and be a wildlife photographer and write the next great American novel.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every weekend I went and climbed somewhere with the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club. It was super important to me. I'm not a good athlete, so I was never a very good climber, but I did dedicate myself entirely to rock climbing. And as part of that, like on climby trips, the movie Rogers came out while I was in college. So we started playing poker. I like to play chess. I mean, I was never that good at chess or poker, you know, never really dedicated myself to either. And my plan after two or three years of college was I was going to leave. I was a scape bomb at Alta in college. I was a housekeeper. I've cleaned a lot of toilets. It was shocking to me how people treated me. And it is like permanently impacted how I treat other people, you know, you'd be cleaning somebody's room and they'd be in it and they'd be reading the same book as you. And like, you know, you'd say, oh, that's a great book. You know, I'm about where you are. And A, they'd look at you like you were spacing, like you speak. And then they get even more shocked. You read?”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I dedicate myself to it completely. I climbed, I did all my homework at the gym, I got to the rock climbing gym at 7 a.m. would skip a lot of classes to stay in the gym. I do my homework on like a big bouldering mat.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the mail came, because it meant that maybe there was an economist or a newsweek or a time or a US news, and I was really into current events. You know, because current events is kind of like applied history and watching history happen, thinking about what might happen next. I didn't know anything about investing. My parents were both attorneys. Like, I was anytime I won an argument, I was super rewarded. Like, you know, if I could make a reasonable argument why I should stay up late, my parents would be so proud and they'd let me stay up late. But I had to beat them, you know? That was the way I grew up as just kind of going through life and, you know, I really love to ski and I love rock climbing. And I go to college and rock climbing is by far the most important thing in my life.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do believe at some level kind of investing is the search for truth. And if you find truth first and you're right about it being a truth, that's how you generate alpha, and it has to be a truth that other people have not yet seen. You're searching for hidden truths. The earliest thing I can remember is being interested in history, looking at books with pictures of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans. I loved history. I vividly remember, I think in the second grade, as my dad drove me to school every day, we went through the whole history of World War II in one year. And I loved that. And then that translated into a real interesting current events very early. So as a pretty young person, I don't know if it was eighth grade or seventh grade or ninth grade. I was reading The New York Times and the Washington Post and I would get so excited.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you ever seen public opinion change so fast in the United States on any issue has nuclear power? Just happen like that, like that. And like, why did that happen right when AI needed it to happen? Now we're running up on boundaries of power on Earth. All of a sudden, data centers in space. It's just a little strange to me that whenever there is something, a bottleneck that might slow it down, everything accelerates Reuben is going to be such an easy seamless transition relative to Blackwell, and Reuben's a great chip and then AMD getting into the game with the MI450, whatever AI needs, it gets.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“be Google IBM and then the Honeywell Quantum so the public ways you can invest in this theme which probably is exciting are not the best so you have two really clear bubbles I also think quantum supremacy is very misunderstood people hear it and they think that it means that quantum computers are going to be better than classical computers at everything with quantum you can do some calculations that classical computers cannot do that's it that's going to be really exciting and exciting and awesome But it doesn't mean that quantum takes over the world. I think the thought that I have had, this may be less related to markets that just AI, I have just been fascinated that for the last two years, whatever AI needs to keep growing and advancing, it gets.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does feel like since 2020 kicked off in 2022 punctured this kind of a series of rolling bubbles. So in 2020, there was a bubble in like EV, startup EVs that were not Tesla. And that's for sure a bubble. And they all went down, you know, 99%. And there was kind of a bubble in more speculative stocks. Then we had the meme stocks, you know, GameStop. And now it feels like the rolling bubble is in nuclear and quantum. And these are fusion and SMR. It would be a transformative technology. It's amazing. But sadly, from my perspective, none of the public ways you can invest in this are really good expressions of this theme are likely to succeed or have any real fundamental support. And same thing with quantum. I've been looking at quantum for 10 years. We have a really good understanding of quantum. And the public quantum companies, again, are not the leaders. From my perspective, the leaders in quantum would.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a really nice platform right over there, and you can just hop to it, and then you can put out the fire in your platform that's on fire. And now you got two platforms, and it's great. You know”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pulling the data into their system, and then you will eventually be turned off. It is just crazy. And it's just because, oh wow, but we want to preserve our 80% gross margins. This is a life or death decision. And essentially everyone except Microsoft is failing it. To quote that Bibbo from that Nokia guy long ago, like their platforms are burning.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're in CRM, well, what are customers do? They talk to their customers. We're customer relationship management software and we do some customer support too. So make an agent that can do that. And sell that at 10 to 20 percent and let that agent access all the data you have Because what's happening right now, another agent made by someone else is accessing your systems.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SaaS companies and say stop being so dumb. All you have to do is say, here are my AI revenues and here are my AI gross margins and you know it's real AI because it's low gross margins I'm going to show you that and here's a venture competitor over here that's losing a lot of money so maybe I'll actually take my gross margins to zero for a while but I have this business that the venture funded company doesn't have and this is just such a like obvious playbook that you can run Salesforce, ServiceNow, HubSpot, GitLab, Atlassian, all of them could run this”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Microsoft, it was less dramatic, but you know, Microsoft was a tough stock in the early days of the cloud transition because investors were like, oh my God, you're an 80% gross margin business. And the cloud is the 50s. And they're like, well, it's going to be gross profit dollar accretive. It probably will improve those margins over time. Microsoft, they bought GitHub and they used GitHub as a distribution channel for co-pilot for coding. That's become a giant business. A giant business. Now for sure it runs at much lower gross margins. But there are so many SaaS companies. I can't think of a single application SaaS company that could not be running a successful agent strategy and they have a giant advantage over these AI natives in that they have a cash generative business. And I think there is room for someone to be a new kind of activist or constructivist and just go.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you want to have an agent, it's never going to succeed if you're not willing to run it at a sub 35% gross margin. Because that's what the AI natives are running it at. Maybe they're running it at 40. So if you're trying to preserve an 80% gross margin structure, you are guarantee that you will not succeed in AI. Absolute guarantee. And this is so crazy to me because one, we have an existence proof for software investors being willing to tolerate gross margin pressure as long as gross profit dollars are okay. It's called the cloud. People don't remember, but...”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of retailers that are mass market retailers. So margins can change. And if there's a fundamental transformative kind of new technology that customers are demanding, and it's always a mistake not to embrace it. And that's exactly what the SaaS companies are doing. They have their 70, 80, 90% gross margins, and they are reluctant to accept AI gross margins. The very nature of AI is, you know, software you write at once and it's written very efficiently. And then you can distribute it broadly at very low cost. And that's why it was a great business. AI is the exact opposite where you have to recompute the answer every time. And so a good AI company might have gross margins of 40%. The crazy thing is because of those efficiency gains, they're generating cash way earlier than SaaS companies did historically, but they're generating cash earlier, not because they have high gross margins, but because they have very few human employees. And it's just tragic to watch all of these companies.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that applications ask companies are making the exact same mistake that brick and mortar retailers did with e-commerce. So brick and mortar retailers, particularly after the telecom bubble crashed, you know, they looked at Amazon and they said, oh, it's losing money. e-commerce is going to be a low margin business. How can it ever be more efficient as a business? Right now, our customers pay to transport themselves to the store and then they pay to transport the goods home. How can it ever be more efficient if we're sending shipments out to individual customers Amazon's vision, of course, will eventually we're just going to go down a street and drop off a package at every house. And so they did not invest in e-commerce. They clearly saw customer demand for it, but they did not like the margin structure of e-commerce. That is the fundamental reason that essentially every brick and mortar retailer was really slow to invest in e-commerce. And now here we are and Amazon has higher margins and their North American retail business than.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the price of DRAM, if like a DRAM wafer is valued at like a five carat diamond. In the 90s, when you had these true capacity cycles before Taiwan Semi kind of smoothed everything out and DRAM became more of an oligopoly, you would have these crazy shortages where the price would just go 10x. Unimaginable relative to the last 25 years, where like a giant DRAM cycle, a good DRAM cycle as it probably stops going down. An epic cycle is maybe it goes up, you know, whatever it is, 30, 40, 50%. But I mean, if it starts to go up by X's instead of percentages, that's a whole different game. By the way, we should talk about SAS.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Lementon, coherent, all these companies, there's even like a wave of innovation and memory, which is really exciting to see because memory is such a gaining factor, but it's something that could slow all this down and be a natural governor is if we get our first true DRAM cycle since the late 90s.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is putting pressure on the public companies that also need to be part of this if we're going to go to this annual cadence, which is just so hard. But it's one reason I'm really skeptical of these ASICs that don't already have some degree of success. So I do think that's a super, super important dynamic and one that's absolutely foundational and necessary for all of this to happen because not even NVIDIA can do it alone. AMD can't do it alone. Google can't do it alone. You need the people who make the transceivers, you need the people who make the wires who make the backplanes, who make the lasers. They all have to accelerate with you. And one thing that I think is very cool about AI as an investor is it's just it's the first time where every level of the stack that I look at, at least, the most important competitors are public and private. Nvidia, they're very important private competitors. Broadcom important private competitors. Marvell, important private competitors.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keeping up with them. So I think it's the fact that semiconductor adventure has come back with a vengeance. Silicon Valley, stop being Silicon Valley long ago. My little firm maybe has done more semiconductor deals in the last seven years than the top 10 VCs combined. But that's really, really important because now you have an ecosystem of companies who can keep up. And then that ecosystem of these venture companies.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking an AMD rack, and they need all of those other parts to accelerate with them. So they couldn't go to this one year cadence if the rest everything was not...”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like really good for actually NVIDIA and Google and everyone is just say you are the best DSP architect in the world. You had made for the last 20 years every two years because that's what you have to do. Semiconductors, it's like every two years you have to run a race. And if you won the last race, you start like a foot ahead over time those compound and make each race easier to win. But maybe that person and his team, maybe he's the head of networking at a big public company. And he's making a lot of money and he has a good life and he's 50 years old. And then because he sees these outcomes and the size of the markets in the data center, he's like, wow, why don't I just go start my own company? But the reason that's important is that, you know, I forget the number, but I mean, there are thousands of parts in a Blackwell rack, and there's thousands of parts in a TPU rack. And in the Blackwell rack, maybe Nvidia makes two or three hundred of those parts.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They got just like so cool about it and so underappreciated is your average semiconductor venture founder is like 50 years old, okay? And Jensen and what's happened with NVIDIA and the market cap of NVIDIA has like single-handedly ignited semiconductor venture. But the way it's ignited is ignited in an awesome way.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep up these kids who are growing up native in AI, they're just proficient with it in a way that I'm trying really hard to become.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A deep research thing, and it's good, yeah, you know. Hey, I had this difficult HR situation. How would you handle it? And it's good at that. We're struggling to sell our product. What changes would you make? And it's really good at all of that today. And so, and that goes to these VCs are seeing massive AI productivity in all their companies. It's because their companies are full of these 23, 24, or even younger AI natives. And they're impressive. I've been so impressed with like young investment talent. And it's just part of it. Like your podcast is part of that. There's just very specific knowledge has become so accessible through podcasts and the internet like kids come in and they're just, I feel like they're where I was as an investor, like in my, you know, early 30s and they're 22. And I'm like, oh my God. Yeah. Like I have to run so fast”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These young CEOs, they're just so impressive in all ways, and they get more polished faster. And I think the reason is, is they're talking to the AI. How should I deal with pitching this investor? I'm meeting with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. What do you think the best ways I should pitch him are?”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's crazy, actually. Humans need to come first. We need to have a human-centric view of the world. But the solutions are natural gas and solar. And the great thing is, the great thing about these AI data centers is apart from the ones that you're going to do inference on, you can locate them anywhere. So I think you were going to see, and this is why you're seeing all this activity in Abilene, because it's in the middle of the big natural gas basin, and we have a lot of natural gas in America because of fracking. We're going to have a lot of natural gas for a long time. We ramp production really fast. So I think this is going to be solved, you know, you're going to have power plants fed by gas or solar. And I think that's the solution. And, you know, you're already all these turbine manufacturers were reluctant to expand capacity, but Caterpillar just said we're going to increase capacity by 75% over the next few years. So like this system on the power side is beginning to respond.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power is a governor, the best products are going to win, irrespective of price and have crazy pricing power. That's the first implication that's really important to me. Second, it is the only solutions to this. We just can't build nuclear fast enough in America as much as we would love to build nuclear quickly. We just can't. It's just too hard. NEPA, all these rules, like it's just too hard. Like a rare ant that we could move and it could be in a better environment can totally delay the construction of a nuclear power plant. You know, one ant, you know, that is America today.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very interested. I do feel lucky in a prior life. I was the sector leader for the telecom utilities team. So I do have some base level of knowledge, having Watts as a constraint is really good for the most advanced compute players because if Watts are the constraint, the price you pay for compute is irrelevant. The TCO of your compute is absolutely irrelevant because if you could get 3x or 4x or 5x more tokens per what, that is literally three or four x or 5x more revenue. If you're going to build an advanced data center costs 50 billion, a data center with the ASIC maybe costs 35 billion. If that $50 billion data center pumps out $25 billion of revenue and you're the ASIC data center at $35 billion is only pumping out 8 billion, well, like you're pretty bumped. So I do think it's good for all of the most advanced technologies in the data center, which is exciting to be as an investor. So as long as”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it may be the Taiwan Semi single-handedly that their caution is the governor. I think governors are good. It's good that power is the governor. It's good that Taiwan Simone is a governor. If Taiwan Simi opens up at the same time when data centers in space relieve all power constraints, but that's like, I don't know, five, six years away that data centers in space are a majority of deployed megawatts. Yeah, you get it overbuild really fast, but just we have these two really powerful natural governors. And I think that's good. Smoother and longer is good.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could result in the success. And I actually think it's shameful that the Intel board fired him when they did it. But Leap Boo is a good executive, and now he's reaping the benefits of Patrick's strategy. And Intel has all these empty fabs. And eventually, given the shortages we have of compute, those fabs are going to be filled. So I think Taiwan Simmy's in the process of making a mistake, but they're just so paranoid about an overbuild. And they're so skeptical. They're the guys who met with Sam Altman and laughed and said, he's a podcast, bro. He has no idea what he's talking about, you know? They're terrified of an overbuild.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely, all of them. And actions like, you know, hey, here are your three vacations. Would you like me to book one? And then they're for sure going to collect a commission. There's many ways you can make money. I think we get into great detail on a prior podcast about how just inventory dynamics made these inventory cycles inevitable in SIMI's, the iron law of SIMIs is just that customer buffer inventories have to equal lead times. And that's why you got these inventory cycles historically. We haven't seen a true capacity cycle in SIMIS, arguably since the late 90s, and that's because Taiwan SIMI has been so good at aggregating and smoothing supply. A big problem in the world right now is that Taiwan SIMI is not expanding capacity, has fast as their customers want. They're in the process of making a mistake just because you do have Intel and with these fabs. They're not as good and it's really hard to work with their PDK, but now you have this guy leap boo, who's a really good executive and really understands that business. I mean, by the way, Patrick Kelsinger, I think, was also a good executive. And he put Intel on the only strategy.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There will eventually be a glut. AI is fundamentally different than the software, just in that every time you use AI takes compute in a way that traditional software just did not. I mean, it is true. Like, I think every one of these companies could consume 10x more compute. Like what would happen is just... $200 tier would get a lot better. The free tier would get like the $200 tier. Google has started to monetize AI mode with ads. And I think that will give everyone else permission to introduce ads into the free mode. And then that is going to be an important source of ROI.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're converging, and they really are. So XAI will be the intelligence module for Optimus made by Tesla with Tesla Vision. And then SpaceX will have the data centers in space that will power a lot of the AI, presumably for XAI and Tesla and the octopuses and a lot of other companies. And it's just interesting the way that they are converging. And each one is kind of creating competitive advantage for the other. If you're XAI, it's really nice that you have this built-in relationship with Optimus. Tesla's a public company, so there's going to be like, I cannot imagine the level of vetting that we'll go into that intercompany agreement. And then you have a big advantage with these data centers in space. And then it's also nice if you're an XAI that you have two companies with a lot of customers who you can use to help build your customer support agents, your customer sales agents with kind of built-in customers. So they really are all kind of converging in a neat way. And I do think it's going to be a big moment when that”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need a lot of starships. Like the starships are the only ones that can economically make that happen. We need a lot of those starships. Maybe China or Russia will be able to land a rocket. Blue Origin just landed a booster. This is a big idea. And I do think it's an entirely new and different way to think about SpaceX. And it is interesting that Elon posted or said in an interview that Tesla, SpaceX, and XAI, all kinds of things.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a much better lower cost user experience. So in every way, data centers in space, from a first principles perspective are superior to data centers on Earth”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just because it's so big, training will eventually happen. But then, for inference, let's think about the user experience. When I asked Grock about you and it gave the nice answer, here's what happened. A radio wave traveled from my cell phone to a cell tower. Then it hit the base station, went into a fiber optic cable, went to some sort of metro aggregation facility in New York, probably within like, you know, 10 blocks a here. There's a small little metro router that's routed those packets to a big XAI data center somewhere. The computation was done and it came back over the same path. If the satellites can communicate directly with the phone and Starlink has demonstrated direct to cell capability, you just go boop boom.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's as close to absolute zero as you could get. So, all that goes away. And that is a vast amount of cost, okay? Let's think about how these maybe each satellite is kind of a rack. It's one way to think of it. Maybe some people make bigger satellites that are three racks. Well, how are you going to connect those racks? Well, it's funny in the data center. The racks are over a certain distance connected with fiber optics. And that just means a laser going through a cable. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. So, if you can link these satellites in space together using lasers, you actually have a faster and more coherent network than in a data center on Earth. Okay. For training, that's going to take a long time.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And just the inputs to making the tokens come out of the magic machines in space. You can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day, and the sun is 30% more intense. You can have the satellite always kind of catching the light. The sun is 30% more intense, and this results in six times more irradiance and outer space than on planet Earth. So you're getting a lot of solar energy. Point number two, because you're in the sun 24 hours a day, you don't need a battery. And this is a giant percentage of the cost. So the lowest cost energy available in our solar system is solar energy and space. Second, for cooling, in one of these racks, a majority of the mass in the weight is cooling. The cooling in these data centrises is incredibly complicated. The HVAC, the CDUs, the liquid cooling.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it's like everybody thinks, hey, AI is risky, but you know what? I'm gonna build a data center, I'm gonna build a power plant that's gonna do a data center. We will need that. But if you think about it from first principles, data centers should be in space. What are the fundamental inputs to running a data center? Their power and their cooling, and then there are the chips.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important thing that's going to happen in the world, in this world, in the next three to four years is data centers in space. And this has really profound implications for everyone building a power plant or a data center on planet Earth.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit of jousting. Well, Anthropic just signed the $5 billion deal with NVIDIA. That is because Dario is a smart man and he understands these dynamics about Blackwell and Ruben relative to TPU. So Nvidia now goes from having two fighters, XAI and OpenAI, to three fighters. That helps in this NVIDIA verse Google battle. And then if Meta can catch up, that's really important. I am sure Nvidia is doing whatever they can to help Meta. You're running those GPUs this way. Maybe we should twist the screw this way or turn the dial that way. And then it will be also if Blackwell comes back to China, which it seems like it'll probably happen. That will also be very good because then Chinese open source will be back.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the $1.4 trillion in Spidy commitments. And I think that was just like, hey, they know they're going to need to raise a lot of money, particularly if Google keeps its current strategy of sucking the economic oxygen out of the room. And you go from 1.4 trillion rough vibes, code red like pretty fast, you know. And the reason they have code red is because of all these dynamics. So then they'll come out with a model, but they will not affix their per token cost disadvantage yet relative to both XAI and Google and Anthropic at that point. Anthropic is a good company. They're burning dramatically less cash than OpenAI and growing faster. So I think you have to give anthropic a lot of credit and a lot of that is their relationship with Google and Amazon for the TPUs and the trains. And so Anthropic has been able to benefit from the same dynamics that Google has. I think it's very indicative in this great game of chess. You can look at Dario and Jensen maybe have taken a few public comments, you know, that were between them.”
2025-12-09 · Invest Like the Best · Gavin Baker - Nvidia v. Google, Scaling Laws, and the Economics of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.451] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source