AI Semiconductor Landscape feat. Dylan Patel | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner
Episode publishedPodcast: BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and...BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley
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Is scaling dead, then why is Mark Zuckerberg building a 2 gigawatt data center in Louisiana? Right. Why is why is Amazon, building these multi gigawatt data centers? Why is Google? Why is Microsoft building multiple gigawatt data centers plus buying 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars of fiber to connect them together because they think, hey. I need to win on scale, so let me just connect all the data centers together with super high bandwidth so then I can make them act like one data center, right, towards one job. Right? So this is this this whole, like, is scaling over narrative fell
Great to be here. Psyched you both are in the shop today. Dylan, this is one of the things we've been talking about all year, which is, you know, how the world of compute is radically changing. So, Bill, why don't you why don't you tell folks who, who Dylan's all who is and, let's get started.
Yeah. We're thrilled to have Dylan Patel with us from Semianalysis. Dylan has has quickly built, I think, the most respected research group on global semiconductor industry. And so what we thought we'd do today is dive deep on the intersection, I think, between everything Dylan knows from a technical perspective about the architectures that are out there, about the scaling, about the key players in the market globally, the supply chain. And the best and the brightest of people we know are all listening and reading Dylan's work. And then connect it to some of the business issues that our audien
how'd you get into this?
So when I was 8, my Xbox broke. And I have immigrant parents. I, I grew up in rural Georgia, so I didn't have much to do besides be a nerd. And, I couldn't tell them I broke my Xbox. I had to open it up, short the temperature sensor, and fix it. And that was the way to fix it. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but then I stayed on those forms. And then I became a form warrior. Right? You know, you see those people in the comments always yelling at you, Brad. You know, it's like it's like, that was me, right, as a child. And you didn't know I was a child then, but, you know Yeah. Awes
and and to just tell us give us that quick thumbnail on semi analysis today. Like, what is the business?
Yeah. So today, we are a semiconductor research firm, AI research firm. We service companies. Our biggest customers are all hyperscalers, the largest semiconductor companies, private equity as well as hedge funds. And we sell data around where every data center in the world is, how what the power is in each quarter, what how the build outs are going. We sell data around, fabs. We track all 1500 fabs in the world. For your purposes, only 50 of them matter, but, like, you know, 1500 fabs around the world. Same thing with, the supply chain of, like, whether it be cables or servers or boards or tr
So, I mean, you know, Bill, you and I just talked about this. I mean, for Altimeter, our team talks with Dylan and Dylan's team all the time. I think you're right. He's quickly emerged, really, just through hustle, hard work, doing doing the grindy stuff that matters, I think is, you know, a benchmark for what's going on in the semiconductor industry. And we're at this, you know, I suggested we're 2 years into this maybe, you know, this build out. And it's been hyperkinetic. And one of the things Bill and I are talking about is as we we enter the end of 2024 taking a deep breath, thinking abou
Well, so I think if you're gonna talk about AI and semiconductors, there's only one place to start, which is to talk about NVIDIA broadly. Dylan, what percentage of global AI wor
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