“The actual real limitation right now is hardware supply. That's it. It's not capital. It's not debt. … The real constraint right now is power. It is chips. It is materials. With that sort of a limitation, 80% of these things are going to go to the scale providers.”

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

Context

Casado was sorting neoclouds, neolabs and token factories. He says physical supply is the binding limit, which in his view favors the biggest players, with the rest going to niche providers.

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Transcript

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 40:50 into the episode

Martin Casado

I think. So, in my world, that wouldn't be considered a neolab. That would be it. Like, all neo clouds want to be token factories. So, I would view of like your output is like a token of an existing model architecture. Communication

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

or something? Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Casado

…like that. And by the way, to be fair, that's what OpenAI's original thesis was. And to some extent, Anthropics, which is like, if you solve the intelligence problem, the business model part is easy. So that's to me a Neolab is new architecture, model training. And sometimes they'll buy their own infrastructure and buy their own GPUs, but like that's not what they're building towards or selling. The real constraint right now is power. It is chips. It is materials. With that sort of a limitation, 80% of these things are going to go to the scale providers. 20% are just going to be kind of hard to reach places, niche type places. Like I have the relationship with a random government that has the power. It's kind of funny. I've met this company, a GPU marketplace. That's what it does. But it's like the most low-level version of it. And like many of their GPUs converted chicken sheds, like chicken coops where like people in farms are like finding…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

I heard this story recently that someone asked Larry Page how much of compute will be orbital and he said five nines. And the reason was it's just physics. Eventually it's all going to be in space.

Martin Casado

The actual space thing actually pencils out, but the reason it makes the most sense is just regulatory.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Just because it skirts it.

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

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