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DB Dave Blundin Dave Blundin Venture investor and serial entrepreneur, managing partner at Link Ventures and chairman of Cogo Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, xAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. If you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. You can't innovate if you don't have access to compute, and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like the Rockefeller era again.”

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, xAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. If you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. You can't innovate if you don't have access to compute, and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like the Rockefeller era again.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Context

The conversation had moved from data center bans to who actually gets compute. Dave argued the bigger problem is concentration: a few buyers have locked up supply, which starves startups.

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Transcript

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 1:18:01 into the episode
Salim Ismail

And let's hope our politicians don't shut down all the data centers and block it or slow it down at that level.

Speaker 3

Best of times, worst of times. I don't think things are as dire as one might fear. I don't think they're as great as they might be on the other hand. But either way, recursive self-improvement to the rescue. The software is running away regardless of what's going on at the hardware layer.

Dave Blundin

Well, I think there's a much bigger issue, too, than data center pacing. Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, XAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. All TSMC's capacity, they don't do multi-year contracts, but if they did, it would be locked up for years. And so if you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. Maybe that'll be a big election item in a couple of years where you can't innovate if you don't have access to compute and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big, big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like Rockefeller era again. And the DOJ has been basically doing nothing the last couple of years, too. That's

Speaker 3

why, from my perspective, the nightmare scenario is a repeat of what happened with nuclear energy in this country where we went through 50 years of nothingness or space exploration for that matter. I really, really don't want to see a 50-year gap in technological progress due to a moral panic…

Salim Ismail

One of our pilot clients tried to get set up on one of the clouds and went through the whole application form. And then we're told, I'm sorry, you're not big enough as a customer. We're only focusing on really big customers. So they're like, wow, what are we supposed to do? So the compute shortage…

Dave Blundin

It sure is, man. We got our NVL72 as a 72 GPU GB300 NVIDIA machine. It comes online on Feb1, but we had to use inside contact, Kush Bavaria, our good friend at Orn. Without his help, we wouldn't have been able to get it at all. Because, yeah, everything's reserved. And some of the NeoClouds…

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

More from Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

“Cam outside here had half a billion tokens on Friday, which is about the equivalent of, I swagged at it, about 5,000 workers working for him on that day, and it cost about $5,000, so about a buck per worker per day. If those were actual human beings here in the office, they would have eaten more potato chips than that alone.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis “If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and say, 'give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better,' and then you go to the AI that just solved Navier-Stokes and ask for its 10 best ideas, if Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI, because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and Noam is still one guy.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis