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VK Vinod Khosla On Summation with Auren Hoffman

“Everybody was surprised by how fast AI grew. Because of that, there was only one option for a GPU, which is NVIDIA. So they can get 80% margins instead of the typical 30% in semiconductors. … My bet is their market share will have to decline and their margins will have to decline.”

Summation with Auren Hoffman · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Everybody was surprised by how fast AI grew. Because of that, there was only one option for a GPU, which is NVIDIA. So they can get 80% margins instead of the typical 30% in semiconductors. … My bet is their market share will have to decline and their margins will have to decline.” — Vinod Khosla, Summation with Auren Hoffman

Context

Asked why mega-cap companies keep getting bigger if innovation comes from startups, Khosla says Nvidia's margins are an artifact of having had no alternative, and expects custom chips from AI labs to undercut it as they come online.

Transcript

Summation with Auren Hoffman Around 12:42 into the episode
Vinod Khosla

…Big corporations are great at incremental innovation. Intel can go from, or Samsung can, or TSMC can go from a seven nanometer process to five to three to two to one and a half. But radical innovation only has come from startups the last 40 years. Can't think of one example of a large innovation.

Auren Hoffman

If that's happening, and assuming like the rents go to the innovators, why are these mega cap companies just getting bigger and bigger and bigger?

Vinod Khosla

You know, because they are taking advantage of the current opportunity. Everybody was surprised by how fast AI grew. Because of that, there was only one option for a GPU, which is NVIDIA. So they can get 80% margins instead of the typical 30% in semiconductors. Right. But when a chip like jalapeno from OpenAI comes along and I consider OpenAI a startup, it's one-fifth the cost of DPU because it doesn't have the markup. It's also better tuned to the OpenAI model. So that's probably effectively one-tenth the cost of running an open source model on an NVIDIA GPU to run the proprietary model on a jalapeno GPU. So one, and we can come back to it, open…

Auren Hoffman

Now, in some ways, you're an expert. You've been doing this a while. You've seen so many of these movies before. How do you stop yourself from making the mistake that many experts make?

Vinod Khosla

I spend most of my time with entrepreneurs. I spend most of my time being relevant to a 25 or 30 year old. I can sit behind my desk and talk at them, or I can just mostly meet a lot of them and listen. I never speak at financial conferences. I only talk to entrepreneurs. I think I'm in the most…

Auren Hoffman

Yeah. And by the way, I think what you just said is really interesting that you're learning more today than ever. Like it's so much easier today to learn more than ever that if one isn't learning more today, like you have a real problem. Like you don't even want to learn if you're not learning more…

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

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