20VC

Harry Stebbings × Thomas Sohmers

Positron co-founder Thomas Sohmers frames inference as a memory-wall problem: GPU FLOPS rose 120x from 2014–2024, versus 17x for memory bandwidth.Positron targets cutting a 500-megawatt Nvidia deployment to 100 megawatts, while cached tokens cost roughly one-thousandth of recomputation and support reported 80-point Anthropic API gross margins.Planned capacity may shift locations rather than disappear, but debt, regulation, and concentration remain risks to monitor.

Harry Stebbings × Cliff Weitzman

Speechify’s owned-GPU strategy compares $35,000–50,000 annual H100 rental with roughly $30,000 to buy, potentially lowering compute costs.NVIDIA’s deal with Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs could create a liquid secondary market and price floor through buybacks up to 25% of GPU value.Weitzman calls missing B2B his biggest strategic mistake; Simba 3.2 costs $10 per million characters versus ElevenLabs’ $100, but execution against an “unstoppable” rival remains unresolved.

Harry Stebbings

Jensen Huang’s 50-company open-weights letter, signed by Microsoft, Meta, IBM and Sam at OpenAI but not Anthropic, signals that frontier labs now face competition from their own customers.Open weights threaten Nvidia’s CUDA margins while LLM agents create a likely security catalyst, and Google’s negative free cash flow plus upcoming CIO budget ceilings could amplify AI volatility.

Harry Stebbings × Lin Qiao

Fireworks argues that private enterprise data favors millions of specialized models over one AGI, with open weights offering control and customization once models cross the quality threshold.It processes 40+ trillion tokens daily and expects 10x lower token costs to drive 100x usage, while $800M in AR and 30-40% gross margins reflect rapid scaling and leave infrastructure bottlenecks in energy, chips, and transistors.

Harry Stebbings × Aravind Srinivas

Aravind’s headline call is that Micron could surpass Meta in value within 6-12 months because memory remains the bottleneck after prices rose 5x.His broader thesis shifts value from commoditized search and models to orchestration and token value per watt, while power constraints, China’s vertical integration, and a 20-30% DeepSeek-moment risk remain key watchpoints.

Harry Stebbings × Roman Chernin

Nebius’s 40% one-week stock drop during DeepSeek panic coincided with its best commercial week, as cheaper intelligence made more inference workloads viable and increased consumption.Nebius has raised prices yet faces pipeline pressure, while its four-layer stack expands from scarce bare-metal capacity to managed inference and speculative agentic workloads; consolidation into three or five super-model empires remains the key risk.

Harry Stebbings × Andrew Feldman

AI demand is running ahead of infrastructure, with Cerebras carrying a $25B backlog after models became genuinely useful somewhere in 2025.Structural HBM shortages could persist for years as new fabs require $40B and five years, while Cerebras’s SRAM architecture avoids HBM and CoWoS constraints.Cerebras reports Kimi K2.6 running 6.7x faster than the next-fastest GPU cloud, while its $20B+ OpenAI deal keeps customer concentration in focus.

Harry Stebbings × Anj Midha

Anthropic’s $100M seed was rejected by 21 of 22 investors, while its compute-multiplier thesis eventually supported Amazon’s original $4B compute-for-equity deal.Midha sees supply, stranded GPUs, sovereign infrastructure, and China’s full-stack race as the decisive constraints, with an inference “iron dome” and European compute capacity worth monitoring.

Harry Stebbings × Max Altman

Cursor’s valuation depends on AI coding becoming universal infrastructure, with proprietary models, distillation and hardware efficiency potentially lifting margins despite reliance on model suppliers that are also competitors.The key downside is a price war enabled by portable prompts and thin integrations, while illiquid late-stage marks, concentrated AI exposure and uncertain inference utilization could turn a rapid financing cycle into a fast correction.

Harry Stebbings × Andrew Feldman

Cerebras raised $1bn at a record valuation because it had margins while rivals had negative ones, despite still intending to go public; UAE orders may have represented 75-80% of revenue and consumed manufacturing capacity.Feldman argues two-year chip depreciation is empirically wrong and Nvidia’s pre-announcements and OpenAI investment signal defensive demand capture, while power sits in the wrong places; investors should watch utilization, customer concentration, permitting, and whether AI adoption delivers productivity.