The demand for AI has outpaced everybody's expectation, everybody's forecast. And so everybody's chasing. They're chasing chips or they're chasing memory or they're chasing data centers. OpenAI, we announced in January a huge partnership, one of the biggest deals done in Silicon Valley history. We'll be doing more than 20 billion of hardware for them over the next several years. I'm concerned that there are ways frequently for Nvidia to exercise market strength. Their ways for to use their balance sheet to limit competition. We have a chance for our children or the next generation not only to not die from cancer but to not know anybody who died from cancer.
Andrew Feldman, welcome to Sorcery.
Well, thank you so much for having me. We are out here in Paris at Raise.
It's pretty okay. I also heard you're one of the most popular people here.
That would be first in my life. So it's nice of you to say.
A big theme though is, and we were talking about this just off camera, is hardware is cool. Semiconductors are cool. Everything is in fashion now.
We are in fashion. We're in demand. We're hard to get. It's a big change. I think what's happened is the demand for AI has sort of outpaced everybody's expectation, everybody's forecast. And so everybody's chasing, they're chasing chips or they're chasing memory or they're chasing data centers. There's an opportunity to invent new things, different architectures. It's really a time of sort of a Cambrian explosion of ideas. That's really fun.
So you were at Raise last year. I remember this because I think you had the biggest booth here. There was a fence around it.
And a lot of people. What is the biggest difference between last year and this year?
Oh, I think last year was their first year, right? And I think there are more people here. There are more participants. So there are more attendees. There are more companies participating. I think people are participating in a bigger way. I think the dinner last night at the Versailles, in a secret location called Versailles, was sort of awesome. You know, we spend a lot of time in the digital world and the people we talk about AI to go look at something that illiterate masons made 400 years ago, right? And to sit in it and to enjoy the grandeur is extraordinary, right? This wasn't AI. This wasn't EDA design or CAD or these were guys with pen and paper communicating with, you know, masons and other tradesmen who couldn't read and they built something unbelievably beautiful and that was really fun.
Mhm. And so you're going to be on stage this year. What are you mainly going to...
I'm on stage with Satchin from OpenAI. You know, we announced in January a huge partnership, one of the biggest deals done in Silicon Valley history. We'll be doing more than 20 billion dollars of hardware with for them over the next several years. We'll talk a little bit about deploying hardware and fast AI and how important fast inference is in the emerging sort of inference AI landscape.
Inference is a hot topic. Everyone loves inference.
Yeah. We make AI with training, right? And we use AI with inference. And so as the models and as the AI we made becomes useful, everybody wants to use it and inference is the mechanism through which we use it. And so now we have smart AI and people want to use it and when they want to use it, they want to use it and they want to be fast. And that's sort of where we come in and where the fast is not by a little bit but by 20x. And so everybody's using their AI. They're trying new things. They're deploying, you know, GPT or Claude or one of these super models. And it's sort of an explosion of building, of trying new things, of a new way to work. It's pretty fun.
So, we're nearly two months after your IPO, and there was one post that I thought was really cool. You posted that you had a very large chip on your shoulder.
And it was quite literal and physical. I hoped that, you know, now that we're running a public company, that I wouldn't lose sort of the self-deprecating humor, whatever, that I enjoy the sort of tone in my social posts. And so, we put a giant chip, we put this sort of on my shoulder like this, and we built a harness for it. And yeah, that was a fun one. I think that people assume that as a CEO or of any size or an entrepreneur that it's sort of always peaches and cream and it's just not the case. There's an enormous amount of hard work. There's sacrifice that you make and that your family makes. They see you less and it's not for a little bit. It's not like a weekend or two weeks in a row you work hard. For years. And so sharing that a little bit is something I thought would be well received.
So what's been the biggest difference for you post IPO?
The number of people who want something.
Yeah. Has exploded of one form or another. And we get a little better at triaging those between my executive assistant and chief of staff and just if you get 80 emails a day of different people asking you for something. That's not work. That's just through this range of people who want something of one form or another to meet you, your time, for you to present, for you to donate to their cause, for you to... Whoa. That was a little unexpected.
Your last company you helped create a hundred millionaires. This company you have, I don't know, countless more.
Maybe future thousand, right?
At IPO is more. It was about a thousand.
Would that be investors and employees or...
Okay. Wow. And so what lesson do you learn from that as a CEO? Like what is in your mind?
I think a couple things. I think to do the job you got to love to build. I think making money is really great and making money for people you care about is really really great. And when you get a chance to deliver for people who bet on you, who bet chunks of their career, right? Your investors, it's great to deliver for them. They bet on you, but they're diversified. They bet on you and 20 other companies. When someone bets five or seven years of their career and a career is 30 years, right? They're betting a sixth of their professional career. And when you get to deliver for them and they get to achieve the financial goals that they wanted, that's a great feeling and what I'm proud of every day.
It's a very selfless position on that. I mean it's really interesting because today I mean in the backdrop we are in a hyper super cycle whatever you want to call it of AI and so these companies that are coming up whether they're in semiconductors or they're in I don't know models or you know coding agents there's a lot of companies that are rising up really fast and hitting that billion dollar mark. Some are having liquidity events like OpenAI and Anthropic to come. But others are getting that paper markup and they're seeing that kind of wealth creation event. How do you maintain a healthy mindset around that?
I think you bring it, it's not a change, right? For the type of people I love working with, they like building stuff and they like building hard stuff when it paid a little, when it was out of fashion, you know, when hardware was uncool, they were still building hardware because that's what they like to build. And now that it's in fashion, they like to build hardware. And they're sort of even keel about that, that their passion is the building. And I think in Silicon Valley, which sort of is what I know, that chasing money is not the path to money. That the path to happiness is working on projects you like with colleagues that are interesting for people with integrity. And if you do that, the money will come. But even more importantly, you work on things you like and you'll work with people you learn a little something from and you can teach a little something from. And if that's the way you set about pursuing your career, I think when things are really bad, you're on even keel. And when things are really good, you're on even keel because you're enjoying what you're doing.
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So looking forward, I'm sure this is also just a mark in your journey because you're a builder. So, what are you most looking forward to over the next couple months as we said across this year?
Look, getting to an IPO is not the end of a journey. It's sort of a plateau. It's sort of the arrival at corporate adulthood. It is the achieving one plateau so that you can climb others. And our opportunity has gotten bigger. We have more resources. We're better recognized. We can reach more people and we can sort of prosecute our vision and our ambitions with more fuel. And so that's what we're excited about every day, you know, building more chips, building more data centers, inventing technology that moves the industry forward. That's what drives us and gets us out of bed every day.
I think I was listening to a Harry Stebbings episode that you did and talking about data centers and the demand for them and how we're actually not trying to meet future demand. We're actually just really behind.
On where we are. So, could you explain where we are with the data center buildout?
Right. So, what happened is data centers had historically moved at sort of the speed of real estate, right? Somebody would decide to build a building and two years later after permits and they poured concrete and the building would go up. And two years ago nobody cared about AI, right? Two years ago we were at the beginning of this and the AI explosion has happened so quickly there's so much demand for compute we've outstripped the demand for compute, for memory, and where do these things go? They go to these buildings and they haven't made them fast enough and so people are chasing data centers around the world and that's what's happening. And so it is a major limitation for everybody right now.
We just had Tony Kim on and we were talking about the new architecture of data centers. So how are you working with other companies whether it's through your buildouts creating the right stack and architecture?
Sure. So you know the interesting thing about data centers is they hadn't changed a lot in 20 years and a lot of the infrastructure in them hadn't changed. I mean the generators that we use for backup have been unchanged for about 20 years. The type of batteries we use for backup, the chillers and the CDUs and suddenly there's this sort of intense demand and sort of people are looking to innovate and they're using fuel cells and guys are using jet engines like Boom to generate power for these data centers and the turbines are being rethought of. And so there's sort of an innovative push in the data center. Now, for us, while we build this sort of super big chip, the chip that's like 58 times larger than any other chip, it goes in a server. It goes in a metal enclosure that's about the size of a fridge for a dorm room, little fridge. And we put a couple of those in a standard rack. And so the physical requirements weren't very different from if you're going to deploy a competitor's product. What Tony's really talking about is sort of these buildings were sort of unimproved for a generation and now they're part of a factory that makes AI and people are trying to optimize every part of that factory.
Yeah. And now they're also putting them in space.
Yeah. Well, they're talking about putting them in space. So I think like a lot of technology, you talk about it for a long time before it happens.
