The a16z Show

David George × Gavin Baker

AI demand accelerated through July and August, with usage concentrated among possibly sub-10 million heavy users and no leader identifying a worsening quantitative metric.Nebius suggests nine-to-ten-month paybacks on $50B-per-gigawatt builds, supported by 50-60% customer prepayments; undersupply through ’28 could lift token prices, while shifting capacity to training could cut lab revenue from $480B to $120B.

Erik Torenberg × Dylan Patel × Sarah Wang × Guido Appenzeller

Nvidia’s $5 billion Intel investment, following SoftBank’s $2 billion and the U.S. government’s $10 billion, could lower Intel’s cost of capital and redraw PC and data-center competition, though Patel says Intel still needs roughly $50 billion.Huawei has credible 7 nm designs and ambitious custom-HBM products, but HBM3 yields, etch capacity, and domestic volume remain unresolved as Nvidia’s upside depends on $450–500 billion of hyperscaler capex rather than further share gains.

Dylan Patel × Erin Price-Wright × Guido Appenzeller × Erik Torenberg

GPT-5’s router is an economic release, directing simple queries to mini models while reserving “ungodly amounts of compute” for transactions OpenAI could monetize through agentic commerce.Flat-rate subscriptions face heavy-user losses, while custom silicon threatens Nvidia mainly if demand stays concentrated among hyperscalers; powered sites, grid equipment, and Intel’s capital needs remain near-term constraints on broader deployment.

Steph Smith × Martin Casado × Steven Sinofsky

DeepSeek R1’s permissive MIT-like license and released reasoning traces enable broad adoption and distillation into smaller models, shifting strategic advantage toward distribution and “AGI in your pocket.”Model value may migrate from benchmark leadership to stateful workflows as competitors catch up, while scale-out expands endpoints without eliminating hyperscale compute.The clearest policy signal is that chip and open-source restrictions did not prevent capable Chinese research, making faster domestic innovation and permissionless diffusion the unresolved US advantage.