Harry Stebbings × Erik Bernhardsson

Modal has reached $1 billion ARR after 15X growth in 12 months, yet capacity spending keeps cash flow negative.Its 25-neocloud pool, per-GPU-second pricing and adjacent products aim to smooth demand, retain customers and lift gross margins toward Bernhardsson’s 40–60% range.Watch whether 30–40% monthly growth can support buying roughly two to three times projected capacity as hardware-price timing remains unknowable.

Molly O'Shea × Philip Johnston × Ezra Feilden × Adi Oltean × Bailey Montaño × Miguel Rivera × Camilo Lopez

Orbital compute’s cost case hinges on launch falling below roughly $500/kg, versus about $5,000/kg on Falcon 9.Government customers are testing radar and hyperspectral inference, aiming to turn large image downlinks into actionable coordinates in minutes; Starcloud 2’s planned January launch tests radiator claims.Johnston says a 10% or 20% higher chip failure rate in space could break the economics, despite three months of chip burn-in.

Peter Diamandis × Salim Ismail × Dave Blundin × Alexander Wissner-Gross × Emad Mostaque

Anthropic’s proposed $1.5–2 trillion IPO pairs $16.3 billion in first-half 2026 revenue and nearly $1 billion in Q2 operating profit with more than $500 billion in compute commitments.Neocloud declines expose financing risk, with rivals reportedly borrowing at 15% versus SpaceX’s 8%; recursive self-improvement could eventually shock compute demand.Kimi K3.1 Pro’s score of 55, planned open weights and $2/$10 per million input/output token pricing add pressure on closed-model economics as reliability and task completion gain importance.

Nathan Labenz × Prakash Narayanan × Zvi Mowshowitz × Evan Conrad × Lonis Hamaili

Zvi Mowshowitz sketches a conditional weekly-release path; contacts call 2027 “completely crazy” and say 2028 “might be unrecognizable.”Evan Conrad says GPU financing is constrained “entirely” by credit; three-to-five-year commitments and sometimes 100% upfront payments could force lab sales within one or two years.Cambrian sees memory rerating from five-to-six times earnings to 10–12 times if demand keeps outrunning supply.

Harry Stebbings × Naveen Rao

Rao sees US spare power becoming scarce within years, tying AI growth to construction.Unconventional co-designs models and hardware for efficiency as falling token prices pressure inference margins, despite a $10 trillion market forecast within 10 years.He sees robotics 100 times larger than agentic coding, with prototypes in two to three years and a market in five to seven.

Peter Diamandis × Salim Ismail × Dave Blundin × Alexander Wissner-Gross

SpaceX’s AI pivot pairs nearly $20 billion in quarterly spending with sub-year data-center payback and guidance for $100 billion annual revenue run rate by December.A possible SpaceX–Tesla merger remains exploratory, with no agreed terms; the 30–40% premium estimate sharpens approval and Musk-dependence risks.Agent monitoring failures and decade-old PHP vulnerabilities also make defensive AI infrastructure an immediate operating requirement.

Jordan Nanos × Howie × Sherry Zhang

2025 patents point to ASML's unannounced die-to-wafer bonder, several years out, leveraging its metrology and wafer-stage strengths.Logic’s shorter, denser connections offer the clearer efficiency case; HBM’s higher costs and customer requests for fewer layers leave use unlikely before 2029, if at all.Yield still hinges on six-axis alignment, particle control and supplier integration across the conveyor design.

Vibhu × Basil Chatha × Erik Bernhardsson

Bernhardsson estimates Modal is at least 50× larger, with Sandboxes now a third of revenue and growing 30% month over month.As GPU supply shifts to almost 25 clouds and three-plus-year prepaid deals, Modal can aggregate thousands of customers to flexibly slice “three-year rectangles.”Locked-in reservations leave Modal exposed if GPU prices and utilization fall together.

Dwarkesh Patel

Ranade says available tools may support 2X, not 10X, leading-edge wafer output, while an Intel speaker says AI demand is 40–50% above maximum capacity.With roughly 80% of fab costs fixed, utilization and yield matter; TSMC ships upwards of 3X Intel’s leading-edge wafers, and Ranade says Intel will invest more, though tool limits remain.

Sam Altman × Matthew Berman

Altman’s long-run compute bet rests on intelligence becoming cheaper and expanding demand, with custom chips, robotics, and supply-chain investment potentially lowering costs per watt.He sees infrastructure scale and customer integration as durable advantages, while RSI could make technological lead decisive; he calls pushing it aggressively dangerous and says speed limits are needed.OpenAI’s hardware aims to give assistants richer context beyond screens, while Altman’s hoped-for disease-treatment candidate within a couple of years remains far from an approved medicine.