Description
Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) joins Matt Turck for a deep dive into the AI chip wars — why NVIDIA is shifting from a “one chip can do it all” worldview to a portfolio strategy, how inference is getting specialized, and what that means for CUDA, AMD, and the next wave of specialized silicon startups. Then we take the fun tangents: why China is effectively “semiconductor pilled,” how provinces push domestic chips, what Huawei means as a long-term threat vector, and why so much “AI is killing the grid / AI is drinking all the water” discourse misses the point. We also tackle the big macro question: capex bubble or inevitable buildout? Dylan’s view is that the entire answer hinges on one variable—continued model progress—and we unpack the second-order effects across data centers, power, and the circular-looking financings (CoreWeave/Oracle/backstops). Dylan Patel LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanpatelsa/ X/Twitter - https://x.com/dylan522p SemiAnalysis Website - https://semianalysis.com X/Twitter - https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_ Matt Turck (Managing Director) Blog - https://mattturck.com LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/ X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck FirstMark Website - https://firstmark.com X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap (00:00) - Intro (01:16) - Nvidia acquires Groq: A pivot to specialization (07:09) - Why AI models might need "wide" compute, not just fast (10:06) - Is the CUDA moat dead? (Open source vs. Nvidia) (17:49) - The startup landscape: Etched, Cerebras, and 1% odds (22:51) - Geopolitics: China's "semiconductor-pilled" culture (35:46) - Huawei's vertical integration is terrifying (39:28) - The $100B AI revenue reality check (41:12) - US Onshoring: Why total self-sufficiency is a fantasy (44:55) - Can the US actually build fabs? (The delay problem) (48:33) - The CapEx Bubble: Is $500B spending irrational? (54:53) - Energy Crisis: Why gas turbines will power AI, not nuclear (57:06) - The "AI uses all the water" myth (Hamburger comparison) (1:03:40) - Circular Debt? Debunking the Nvidia-CoreWeave risk (1:07:24) - Claude Code & the software singularity (1:10:23) - The death of the Junior Analyst role (1:11:14) - Model predictions: Opus 4.5 and the RL gap (1:14:37) - San Francisco Lore: Roommates (Dwarkesh Patel & Sholto Douglas)