The Semiconductor Earnings Boom Is Just Getting Started | Ben Pouladian on why AI is Real, Nvidia is Mispriced, and Capacitors Are Overrated
Episode publishedPodcast: Monetary Matters with Jack Far...Monetary Matters with Jack Farley
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Got a special conversation today. I'm joined by Ben Kulandian of BEP Research. Ben is a specialist investor and analyst in the semiconductor world and the semiconductor supply chain. Of course, that is what powers AI. Ben, welcome to Monetary Matters.
Thanks for having me, Jack. Excited to be here. Love your podcast, and would love to dive in on some interesting topics and some things that your listeners care about.
I'm I'm really glad you're here too. I really like your work. You're very in the weeds on the semiconductor world. I wanna start by asking kind of the the propose the bear argument. You know, Ben, perhaps many people watching this, many institutional investors are who are a little skeptical about AI, skeptical about semiconductors. They may think, you know, that this is the repeat of the .com bubble. And so my first question to you is Cisco was a very profitable company. The earnings and the growth experience in the .com bubble was extreme just like it is now in AI. Why isn't NVIDIA Cisco? Why
Thanks. A lot of people would bring up Cisco and overlay the NVIDIA chart. The the challenge with Cisco and comparing it to fiber, in my opinion, things like that are sort of like a commodity. So when you're talking about datacom or telecommunications, it's the idea of transmitting the data. Right? So it just goes from point a over to point b. With compute and NVIDIA, you have the chance of actually creating intelligence, something from nothing. Everybody wants intelligence. It's not a commodity that anyone else can make. And I think that is a discerning difference. You needed a company like C
So here's I'll start where I disagree. I think intelligence is kind of a commodity. Like, OpenAI creates geniuses and Anthropic creates digital geniuses. Sometimes some geniuses are better than others. Now the other one company pulled pulled ahead, and there are some are better at math, better at writing. Okay. But that is kind of like, it is kind of a commodity. But here's where I agree with you that semiconductors are not a commodity.
The challenge is people are just still using AI to do routine work like, Hey, help me plan my trip. Obviously write software or how do I make this recipe? What's this bug that I took a picture of? The next inflection of AI, which we'll see coming and what I'll be writing about soon is the intersection of artificial intelligence and the bigger sciences, mostly material science, biotech, and other things. Once you start discovering new materials, new medicines, that impact of doing something ten years in the lab trying to figure out if you can model it with AI and the actual GPUs and computers a
So you're saying that your bull case is not only 15% of the population is using AI every day to plan their trips and do routine tasks, and that 15% is gradually gonna head to 70 or 80%? That is not your bull case. Your your bull case is that mainly the intelligence is going to be advanced at the frontier that can do tasks that previously required millions, tens of millions, billions of dollars in human intelligence, and now that can be done much more cheaply and at scale. That's what you're saying.
Yeah. I mean, going back to what Jensen has been saying at GTC for a while from NVIDIA, the whole point of all this is can you do your life's work in your lifetime? So when you look at R and D for medicine and people working in the labs, there's a lot of trial and error. If you can scale that with and compress the time to get to better patient outcomes with better options, that is the unlock. You couldn't do that with classical computi
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