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2026-07-15
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  1. “Because the supply chain stuff means that 5x actually turns into a two and a half X and then NVIDIA can compress their margin a little bit if you're actually competitive. And then that 2.5x becomes like a 50% better. And then, yeah, so it's like it ends up being way too difficult to in the software stuff, right? Everything takes your 5x and makes it like, oh, you're actually only 50% better.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Sure Meta continues to buy from them, and Microsoft did buy a bunch, and then they stopped because it's like, well, yes, AMD is giving you all these advantages, but ends up still not being better on a performance per watt basis, and they have a way bigger software team. They're somewhat competitive on like all these dynamics that I mentioned, right? So you can't just do the same thing as NVIDIA. You really and do it better, right? Or try and execute better like AMD. Like you have to really leap forward in some other way. But that's the design cycle takes so long that models will shift. right because they're like, oh, what's the next generation TP and GPU look like? Okay, let's optimize for that. And the research path is, you know, like, great. Like, yes, neuromorphic computing could be the most optimal thing for us to do, but no one's working on that because you have to advance in the tech tree you've chosen, right? If you restart the tech tree, you're going to be like, well, this sucks. And so like if it branches this way and you're over here, you're screwed because you have to be”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “But to be fair, if somebody had a viable competitor, which would even be marginally cost competitive, if my guess is many of the big consumers of GPUs would immediately shift some revenue there just to have a number tool, right?”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, and then there's software as well, right? But it's like NVIDIA's gonna have better networking than you, they're gonna have better HBM, they're gonna have better processed node, they're gonna come to market faster, you're gonna be able to ramp faster, gonna have better negotiations with whether it's TSMC or SK Hynix and the memory and silicon side or all the rack people or like copper cables, everything, they're gonna have better cost efficiency. So you have to be like 5x better.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Because you have to win by 5x because NVIDIA is going to have supply chain efficiency over you. They're going to have time to market over you in terms of like a new process node or new memory or whatever technology, right? Even AMD, right? They got to two nanometer before NVIDIA. They had higher density HBM. They used 3D stacking. All these things on supply chain that should be better than NVIDIA, and yet they still lose.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And you even see this for Google, right? Like their open source GEMA models make different decisions because the shapes of a TPU are different than a GPU. And the GPU and the TPU are actually not that far apart, right? Like you would say, yes, they're very different, but Blackwell and TPUs are very, very, they're converging on similar designs, actually. Whereas to be NVIDIA, you can't just have the supply chain win, right? You don't have this captive customer. So now you need to do something that will give you 5x advantage, right? In hardware efficiency for a certain type of workload, and then praying the workload doesn't shift, right? Because NVIDIA is also optimizing their architecture generation. They've added a lot of stuff to make their chips way better for the existing models, but it's like they're taking large steps every year, every two years towards something, whereas you have to go way over there and left field and hope that models stay over there.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is 8K and your bachelor sizes are this big, and your sequence ones are this big. So let's just make a super large systolic array. So you can create the maximum efficiency, and that turns out, oh, look at DeepSeek, or go look at what the labs are doing. Actually, their shapes are much smaller. Actually, you need to do a bunch of small matrix multiplies, not massive, massive, massive singular matrix multiplies per layer. And then it ends up, you know, oh, well, that chip you're designing for that is actually not super effective for that. And so the software is evolving constantly because of what works best on NVIDIA.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Right, there's less DRAM, there's more SRAM. And because there's more SRAM on the chip, you have to have less compute on the chip. Because the model size has got too big and all this, right? And so you have this like super weird dynamic where they bet on something that was actually better, right? Like I have no doubt that cerebrus would run certain types of models better than NVIDIA or Grock or hey Dojo, right? Dojo runs certain, you know, in Tesla's Dojo would run certain types of models way better than NVIDIA's chips because they're optimized to that. But then it's like, oh, well, actually, even NVIDIAS, he's vision transformers now. So it's like, okay, cool. Because model sizes grew and all these things. So it ends up being catch 22 in that like you optimize for something. And so now today you have this new age of AI accelerator companies that are like, okay, we're going to optimize for transformers. But the time they started designing, they're like, okay, transformers are dense models that are this big. What's the best, you know, the hidden dimension?”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's harder for our software co design, right? Like there's like all this hype about neuromorphic computing, right? Like theoretically it's amazing and super efficient. It's like, okay, great. There's no ecosystem of hardware. There's no ecosystem of software. It would take tens of thousands of people who are the best at AI today focusing on that to even prove out if it's worthwhile or not, right? On a hardware side, on a software side, on a model side. And so you look at like Grox, Arepra, Samanova. They all over indexed to the models that were leading at the time when they designed their chips. And so they made certain trade-offs, right? They put a lot more memory on chip and NVIDIA was like, well, we're not going to do that.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That makes sense. I think historically, if you look at it, typically new entrants in markets didn't win by marginally improving on something existing. That happens sometimes, but more likely they jumped on some kind of disruptive technology leap, right? Where it's like, we have a different approach, we have different technology. Is that possible here? I mean, to some degree, maybe this is over simplifying a little bit, but I think part of the reason why the transformer model won was because it runs so incredibly great on GPUs, right? Like a recurrent neural network is similarly performant, it looks like, but it runs terribly on now on a GPU. So did we sort of pick the model for an architecture? And now it's hard to come up with an architecture that really...”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Margin as NVIDIA, AMD sells their GPUs for 50% gross margin, and they have a hard time out engineering NVIDIA, and they're great at engineering, right? But yet they still take more silicon area, more memory to achieve the same performance, and they have to sell for less so their margin gets compressed. That makes sense.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, yeah. And maybe for certain workloads, like metaphor recommendation systems, they'll have a better, you know, they can specialize more. But for the most part, it's like, no, we're targeting the same workloads. We can just simplify supply chain or in-house a lot of it and compress margin. And it'll be fine. But in the case of these other companies, it's like, well, they don't have a captive customer. So now you have to contend with, well, I'm using the same ecosystem. And either I can use some custom silicon provider who's going to take a margin anyways on top, and that's going to compress my what I can sell for. Or I can try and in-house everything. But then it's like, this is really hard, right? Like I'm going to do all the software design. I mean, I'll do all the silicon design. I'm going to build all this different IP. I'm going to manage the supply chain on chips, on racks, on everything, right? Ends up being a huge effort in terms of team size. All in the end, like, hey, I make a 75%.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That are like, yeah, yeah, that's fair. And then there's the old guard, which continues to raise money, right? Like Grock and Swebris. And Samanova and TenseTorin and so on and so forth, right? Or Grafcore getting bought out by Softbank and Softbank dumping money into this effort as well, right? There's a lot of capital being invested to dispert, dispel sort of NVIDIA's top dollar or top position. But it becomes challenging, right? It's like how do you beat NVIDIA? The hyperscalers, I think, are kind of lucky in that they can do mostly the same thing as NVIDIA”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, like, whether you're looking at companies like, I think it's pretty impressive that a few companies like Etched and Rivos and a number of other companies, you know, Maddax and others have gotten the amount of funding they've had without even launching a chip, right? In the past, like, yeah, Silicon companies would make money or raise money, but they would at least launch a chip before they get a, you know, a big round. But like Etched and Rivos have raised a lot of money without ever launching a chip publicly, which I think is, I mean, it speaks to, well, like, yes, silicon is super capital intensive if you're building a chip, especially an accelerator, which has so many moving pieces. There's like 10 different AI accelerator companies out there, right? Like, that are newish in the last few years.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Shifting gears, what about the silicon startups? What's your take on those? I mean, there's a ton of capital flowing into that, right? We've seen not numbers, but probably billions being invested in ship startups.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, yeah. But you guys don't have one of these base 10 or any of these sort of like API investments because you think this is from someone on the infra team that you guys think it'll get commoditized because the software and video is making, because VLM and SD Lang, which is like open source software coming out of Berkeley and now sort of has their own environments now and supported by many like this being commoditized means that like API providers aren't necessarily worth a ton, right? It's sort of your argument maybe. I think that's relevant to this whole thing, which is, you know, why, right? Like, why would you do this?”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I'm talking about a pure API provider investment. I think, right? Is that correct? I think I talked to one of the team members, maybe Rajko or someone about why you guys didn't invest in a together or like a fireworks. And sort of the argument was, well, we think just serving models alone without making them will sort of be commoditized.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Which is why in videos like making all these software libraries, right? Like that's, and they're trying to commoditize inference, right? You guys don't, I think, even have an inference API provider investment, do you?”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Historically, not Pun Nintendo software has eaten the world in most markets, right? I mean, like if you look at early networking days, Cisco was the most valuable company on the planet. No longer, right? The guys that build services on top like Google or Amazon or Meta eventually Eclipse.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So I think Yeah, I think, but I think if you were to ask Sergei, right? Like, hey, do you think selling chips and racks is more valuable or cloud or Gemini, he'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. Like Gemini is going to be worth way, way, way more. It's just not yet today, right? And so I think today you say NVIDIA is the most, again, it's like a whole concentration thing, right? The world is super concentrated in terms of customers, then NVIDIA will not be the most valuable company in the world, right? But if it gets dispersed more and more. Which arguably we're starting to see a lot of these open source models getting better and better and better and with ease of deploying them getting better, then you would see, I think you could argue NVIDIA will remain the most valuable company in the world for a long period of time.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I absolutely think so. I think Google's even discussing it internally. I think it would require a big reorg of culture and a big reorgue of like how Google Cloud works and how the TPU team works and how the Jack software team in XLA software teams work. I totally think they could. It would just take them like shaking themselves pretty hard to be able to do it. Yeah, but I totally think Google should sell TPUs externally, not just renting, but like physically. It's kind of funny.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Is able to compete with Nvidia. In theory, you could do it on the open market. And VIII is worth more than Google these days. Shouldn't Google start selling their chips to everyone? I mean, in theory, they should be able to achieve a higher market cap.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Trinium's not there, but I think Amazon will figure out how to do that and Anthropic will. So I think that's the biggest threat to NVIDIA is that people figure out how to use custom silicon more broadly. And this sort of becomes the sort of like if AI is concentrated, then custom silicon will do better. And that's not even talking about like Open AI's silicon team and stuff, right? Like if AI is really concentrated, then they'll do better custom silicon. But if it gets a dispersed broadly because there's all these open source models from China and there's all these open source software libraries from NVIDIA and China and it makes the deployment costs like rock bottom then potentially”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think that's the biggest thing, right? Is when we look at orders from Google and from Amazon, right, especially Neta, their custom silicon is, not Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks. But the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like 100% utilized, right? Yeah.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I'm more so saying like economically motivated CapEx can only grow like so much, but there's so much other where it's not clear from if you have a spreadsheet and you're basing it on real business that you should actually spend this much, but people will because they believe. I believe, I think you believe, like infra, people believe that this will be, you'll get profit out of it, but there's no 100% certain like, you know, way to argue it. Yeah.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Before we see massive income. No, I think the other thing is there's a lot of capital that's not been spent, right? Like the hyperscalers still can grow CapEx 20, 30% next year, right? From what they're doing this year. In addition, companies like Coreweave and Oracle, because they're tapping capital markets can raise way more than 20 to 30 percent CapEx. And then you go down the list further and it's like, oh, the largest infrastructure funds in the world, like Brookfield and Blackstone. Well, actually, they're turning all of their eyes to investing even more into infrastructure, AI infra. And then you're like, the sovereign wealth funds of the world, like the G42s or the Norway one or GIC and Singapore, like these people have barely started touching AI. And so I think there's a whole lot more CapEx that can come without it being necessarily like economically motivated day one.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “You can spend GPUs? Well, no, I think you can, I think there's still ways to inflect hugely on value capture, right? But I mentioned the ads are a huge value capture. But that needs to happen.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And we do it with very few developers, and then the value capture that I'm able to generate by selling this data, by consulting with it is so high, but the company is making it, they get nothing out of it, right? Like, I think this is a value capture challenge here that far out exceeds the sort of creation, right? And as you get models like GPD5 or open source models, like continuing to drive it down, it's like the value capture is just harder and harder and harder for these companies because they're making 50% gross margin on inference if they're, you know, or less in many cases.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I think the main thing is that AI is already generating more value than the spend. It's that the value capture is broken, right? Like I legitimately believe OpenAI is not even capturing 10% of the value they've created in the world already, just by usage of chat, right? And I think the same applies to anthropic and cursor and whoever else you're looking at. I think the value capture is really broken. Even internally, I think what we've been able to do with like four devs in terms of like automation, our spend on like Gemini API is absurdly low and yet we go through every single permit and regulatory filing around every single data center with AI. And it's like, and we take satellite photos of every data center and we were able to label our data set and then recognize what generators people are using, what cooling towers and the construction progress and substation, all this stuff is like automated and it's only possible because of Gen AI.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think we've already seen AI's value creation exceed so sort of there's like the whole like like the famous like oh 300 billion problem or 200 billion problem now it's 600 billion problem i'm sure sequoia's gonna put out like the 1.2 trillion dollar problem right soon enough but like like there is some like reality in that of course but you know ignores that like infrastructure spend today is accounting for five years of revenue not like one and the revenue looks like this not like flat line but i think um”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So we're probably building technology here, which adds $3 trillion of GDP value. In theory, we could put that into GPUs because that's the main cost. Just from a coding model. Just from a coding model, this is one useful use case. So at least in theory, the value generation is here to keep growing, right? How that translates to the industry is much more complicated.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So, look, let's assume we can get this 100% he off a developer, right? About 30 million developers worldwide, give or take. Yeah, right? Let's say 100K value add per developer. It might be a little high worldwide in US is low, but worldwide is high. So it's $3 trillion.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Bro, like, you know how bad GitHub co-pilot is? Like, how did they look at their revenue ARR? It's so funny if you look at their revenue AR chart, it's like cloud code three months has surpassed that, a cursor, you know, easily surpassed them, and then like,”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I want to buy it. Yeah. I have no idea how this is going to scale, right? But if you ask the question, how much could it scale? How much value are we creating here? Can we create enough value to actually keep growing for a long time? If you just take AI software development, right? We know we can easily get about 15% more productivity out of it.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Who I don't think it's like an obvious bet that they're going to keep raising bigger and bigger rounds. So, what happens there? I think with the, you know, we talked about like coding, right? Like earlier, actually the Quen Coder 3 model is actually super cheap if you're running it on-prem or if you're running it in the cloud with all these inference libraries. And so like there's stuff like that as well. So I think the question is like, how much does it keep growing? Because clearly I think the first third is definitely skyrocketing, right, of open AI anthropic lab spend. The second third of like ads is going to grow. It's not going to grow like crazy, but I think there's definitely an inflection point that could be hit with Gen AI ads. I know Meta's been experimenting with it a lot, but I could totally be convinced that there's going to be a huge inflection and take rate there, right, where you start showing me personalized ads. Like every person that's an ad is like looks like me. And I'll be like, okay, yes, except like slightly better. So I like feel better, right? And I'm like, I want to buy it. Yeah.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Oh, nice Depends how pilled you are on the continued growth, but I think you guys have a good vantage point. We have a good vantage point of how fast revenue is growing for a lot of these companies, especially the code companies, but even many other applications. I think we can clearly see the demand side is accelerating, right? And then if you look at the training side, I think the race is on and that is upping hugely. Google's upping hugely. If you just look at, again, just OpenA and Anthropic and the compute that they have and are getting this year from Google and Amazon for Anthropic and from Microsoft, CoreWeave, Oracle for OpenAI, 30% of the chips are going to them, just those two companies. But that's actually like, okay, well, like 70% of the stuff, like who's making off? Well, one third of it is like ads, right? Whether it be bike dance or meta or many of the other people who are doing ads. So then it's still like, okay, well, where are the rest of these one-third of the chips coming from? Well, they're like mostly uneconomic providers.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “There's a way to do it without harming the user. I think this is how you monetize the free user, right? So I think that's probably what I'd tell him slash ask him about, like a whole line of questions around this.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Would say immediately launch a method for you to input your credit card into ChatGPT and agree that for anything it like agentically does for you, it'll take X cut and then launch that product because where it does shopping, right? Because like everyone knows that Anthropic and OpenAI and all the other labs are buying RL environments of Amazon and of Shopify and of Etsy and of all the different ways to shop on the internet of airline websites, right? Now just like, hey, integrate my calendar. I want to fly to there on Thursday. Make sure I don't miss a meeting. Cool book, right? Do that integration like super well. Know my preferences on whether I like IL or Window, all this stuff, right? And just take a take rate. I think this will make them so much money the moment they launch it. And I think they're working on it already, but I'd like to hear how he thinks about it because he shifted his tone massively on like ads over the last six months, right? He used to be like, no way. And now he's like, maybe, you know.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “With consumers, it's frankly very hard to not have user space pricing just because the variability is so massive, right? If it's us coding versus somebody who does this as their full-time job, right? You just have a factor of 20 or so difference in usage. That costs a lot of money, right? I think for enterprises, we could see more flat feet pricing because you can average it out more.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Well, I think it's the customers that don't want to do usage based pricing because it's so hard to guarantee, it's so hard for it to get away from them. And you actually want guarantees and you're willing to commit to pretty high spend in order to not have usage-based pricing. I think it's the model companies that want usage-based pricing.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “In that sense, like people should be doing subscriptions to get people locked in, right? Instead of moving to usage-based pric”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “That is a billion dollar question. That's a very conservative estimate. Look, Edward McCarthy has this great slide where he basically says, if you're building an a genic system today, right? But fundamentally what it is, it's off this loop where half of the loop is the model thinking. And I'm trying to do something. The other half is then the user verifying what did the agent do? Is it the right thing providing feedback and trying to steer it in the right direction? Because we can't run forever. Eventually, you need to steer it back. One half of that is the model provider, right? They're trying to build the best models. The other half is really about, I think, designing the best possible UI to enable a user to give feedback. And I think there's value in that. So I think there's a certain amount of stickiness in there. So what are all the different tools in terms of say take code editing? How can I most easily visualize what the code changes are? How can it most easily visualize what they impact? Which files? How can I, for small changes, get very quick feedback versus for complex ones, you know, get complex feedbacks? That's not some tools that actually draw diagrams for you of what they do, right? So I think this will be the battle. I think there's stickiness in that, right? How much exactly?”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “How much do you think the customer capture and stickiness for these code products is? I'm curious what you think on that, right? Once you use an IDE, once you integrate one of the CLI products in, like how sticky is it? There's a billion switch”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “To push more and more to, I think, just usage based pricing, right? If you have an underlying commodity that you're reselling to some degree that is that large a part of your cost of goods, right? You need to go to usage pricing.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I mean, but it's clear people are taking advantage of the negative gross margin subscriptions that are offered. I think Anthropic probably makes a positive gross margin off of my subscription. I don't code enough, but there's plenty of people that are definitely losing money. And so as you said, it's an economic.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So, I'm going to find some developer in India that I can do pair programming with so I can get the day cycle. He can get the night cycle, and we both can maximize together the quota for the account. Is that the future then?”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Where people are like competing to see how many tokens they're using through their subscription. And there's like a dude spending like $30,000 a month.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, but like they can't sleep uninterrupted, right? And so because anthropic had to put rate limits that are like not just week-based, but like a number of hours based, and like he like basically sleeps multiple times a day, but small chunks just so you can maximize the usage. And there's also a leaderboard on Reddit”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I think the funniest thing is this whole cost thing you mentioned is like we've seen this in the code space, right? Cursor had to pull away the unlimited clog code. Initially, they have this super expensive plan and it had like unlimited rates. And then they were only like a weekly rate limit. Now they have like hour-based rate limits. And I saw the craziest thread on Twitter where this guy said he changed his sleep schedule, right? modeled after like how sailors in the bay if you're sailing you can't sleep right like is solo sailing they'll take like power naps when they get to the right spots so that they can like still be safe”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I mean, I think definitely right. Like, OpenAI said they doubled their rate limits for big amounts of users. They've dramatically increased the number of tokens they're serving from this launch, which effectively says this is an economic release.”

    2026-07-15 · a16z Podcast · From the Archive: Can Anyone Catch NVIDIA? | The Future of Chips and Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source