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RN Ramtin Naimi On Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

“I think there was going to be like two or three great Neolabs. And now there's probably 80 or 90 Neolabs that have raised somewhere between $1 to $5 billion. … We met a Neolab a couple of weeks ago that was raising $1 billion, I think this was their second round of financing, and they were going to spend the entire billion next year on compute for one training run. And they said they would probably need to raise another $5 billion throughout next year.”

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · Money & Markets · November 2026

“I think there was going to be like two or three great Neolabs. And now there's probably 80 or 90 Neolabs that have raised somewhere between $1 to $5 billion. … We met a Neolab a couple of weeks ago that was raising $1 billion, I think this was their second round of financing, and they were going to spend the entire billion next year on compute for one training run. And they said they would probably need to raise another $5 billion throughout next year.” — Ramtin Naimi, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Context

Asked about the oddity of talk of stranded compute while nobody can get GPU allocation, Naimi describes the boom in new AI labs. His claim is that capital, not chips, may end up as the real constraint.

Transcript

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 17:56 into the episode
Patrick O'Shaughnessy

…having quite a tough week in the markets. And at the same time, literally nobody can seem to get generation prior, let alone current generation Bear Rubin or something allocation from NVIDIA. And the price of GPUs just looks unidirectional. It seems to me like a very bizarre moment in the market.

Speaker 4

The thing that we're seeing in our portfolio

Ramtin Naimi

companies is that we are routinely helping them find compute because finding compute for them is not easy. A lot of the largest NeoClouds, and we have relationships with a number of them, aren't really interested in engaging with compute deals that are like sub $200 million in scale. And so companies that don't have that level of scale are, you know, trying to lease some capacity here, some capacity there. But those guys on a relative basis don't actually make up for the scale of this market. The people that are actually moving the needle for how much compute is necessary in this ecosystem are the hyperscalers, the frontier model labs, and then, you know, the companies that are private, Neolabs raising $1 billion plus seat valuations, effectively. I think the only thing that limits demand for compute over time is if their compute needs from these companies diminish, or the companies that have these compute needs have a harder time raising capital. There's a subset of companies that you know, I know that are going to continue raising because they're the best assets and they'll have all the cash they need to buy all the compute they need. I think the most interesting segment of the market, which on a relative basis is still small…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Could it just be capital is the actual constraint that if the capital markets dry up, then that will be what causes the compute story to change? That's it?

Ramtin Naimi

Potentially. And I think it's more on the debt side than the equity side. I think a lot of these guys that are building these things, they need debt in excess of 5 to 10x of the equity that they raised. Given what happened in public markets with some of the neoclouds in the past couple of weeks, I…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

What about commenting just on seed as like a concept? Some seed deals that get done at just crazy prices and don't really feel like seed. They're like seed risk for Series D pricing or something like this. Of course, with the promise that these new markets are bigger than ever and everything can be…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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