Dylan Patel — Deep Dive on the 3 Big Bottlenecks to Scaling AI Compute
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Alright. This is the episode of my roommate teaches me semiconductors.
It's also the send off for this,
this current set. It's yeah. You're you know, after you use it, I'm like, I can't use this again. I gotta get out here.
Those sloppy seconds for dorkers. Yes.
Okay. Dylan is the, CEO of Semi Analysis. Dylan, the burning question I have for you. If you add up the big four, Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, their combined, forecasted CapEx that you published recently this year is $600,000,000,000 And given, you know, prices of renting that compute, would be like close to 50 gigawatts. Now, obviously we're not putting on 50 gigawatts this year. So presumably that's paying for compute that is gonna be coming online over the coming years. So I have a question about what, how to think about the timeline around when that CapEx comes online. Similar question
rest of the supply chain gets you to on the order of a trillion dollars. A portion of this is, you know, immediately for compute going online this year, right? The chips and the the other parts of CapEx that do get paid this year. But there's a lot of setup CapEx as well. Right? So when we have when we're talking about 20 gigawatts this year in America, roughly Incremental. Incremental added capacity, A portion of this is not spent this year. A portion of that CapEx is actually spent the prior year. And so when you look at, hey, Google's got a $180,000,000,000. Actually, a big chunk of that is
Can you can I ask a question about that? So Yeah. If Anthropic was not on track to have five gigawatts by the end of this year, but it needs that to serve both the revenue that's gone crazier than expected. And maybe it's gonna be even more than that. Plus the research and training to make sure its models are good enough for next year. How how where is that gonna come from?
You know, Dario, when he was on your podcast was very, very like conservative. He's like, you know, I'm not gonna go crazy on compute because if my revenue inflects at a different rate, at a different point, I don't wanna go bankrupt. You know, I wanna make sure that we're being responsible with this scaling. But in reality, you know, he's definitely missed the pooch in terms of, like, going, like, OpenAI, which was let's just sign these crazy fucking deals. Right? And OpenAI has kind of got way more access to compute than Anthropic by the end of the year. And so what does Anthropic have to do
But the thing I wanna understand is so in a what what what does it mean to have to acquire compute in a pinch? Is it that you have to go with like neo clouds that is it that they have worse compute or something? Like in what way is it worse? And is it that you had to pay gross margins to a copywriter that you wouldn't have otherwise had to pay to because you're coming in at the last minute? Who built the spare capacity such that it's available for Anthropic and OpenAI to get last minute? And like basically what is the concrete advantage that OpenAI has gotten they end up at similar compute num
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