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MV Mike Volpi On a16z Podcast

“Right now we live in a world where demand for AI capacity tokens is near infinite and supply is incredibly constrained. So another way to put it is we all just live in Jensen's world.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Right now we live in a world where demand for AI capacity tokens is near infinite and supply is incredibly constrained. So another way to put it is we all just live in Jensen's world.” — Mike Volpi, a16z Podcast

Context

Asked where the infrastructure gaps are for founders, Volpi described the industry as a pull between supply and demand. He says the main supply limit is silicon, so whoever has fab capacity is a kingmaker, and that is unlikely to change for two to five years.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 26:40 into the episode
Mike Volpi

…the infrastructure side, what's sort of the value chain of it. The first thing you would say is right now we live in a world where demand for AI capacity tokens, whatever, is near infinite and supply is incredibly constrained. So another way to put it is we all just live in Jensen's world.

Guido Appenzeller

He's king of the hill, there's no question.

Mike Volpi

I think the shape of the industry will begin to change when either the characteristics of demand change or the characteristics of supply change. And I think my view is right now, the supply side, because so much of the limitation, well, there are some power limitations for sure, but the dominant limitation is silicon. And I would say that unless there's more fab capacity, that doesn't change, which means it's not likely to really change in the next two or three years, maybe five years out. You could imagine that there would be more fab capacity. You could put more wafers through the same machines or you can make more ASML machines and so forth. But that's probably a governing factor of our industry, which means we live in a reasonably scarce world. And those who have fab capacity are actually kind of kingmakers of the infrastructure universe. On the demand side, I do think that the world is going to get smarter about the type of tokens they consume. I think we've been…

Guido Appenzeller

Yeah. I mean, it seems we're moving from a card as the minimum unit to a rack as the minimum unit, or even a few racks in some cases.

Mike Volpi

Yeah, I would say that's a media

Raghu Raghuram

part that they

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

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