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ES Evangelos Simoudis On The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

“Those companies will come to their next round of funding and need to show they have been meeting the claims they were making before. I think a lot of investors, both existing and prospective, are going to be disappointed at what will be posted. And I think we will have a crisis around that. Whether NVIDIA will be able to backstop everything, I do not know.”

The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

“Those companies will come to their next round of funding and need to show they have been meeting the claims they were making before. I think a lot of investors, both existing and prospective, are going to be disappointed at what will be posted. And I think we will have a crisis around that. Whether NVIDIA will be able to backstop everything, I do not know.” — Evangelos Simoudis, The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Context

Discussing the new AI labs that raised large sums and pre-bought compute, the investor predicts what happens when they return for fresh funding.

Listen to the episode → More from Evangelos Simoudis → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica Around 32:08 into the episode
Evangelos Simoudis

Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly what SpaceX has done, in my opinion, with their data center. Okay.

Ben Lorica

Do you think this will happen? This Neo Labs may share capacity next year?

Evangelos Simoudis

I actually think, I mean, to me, what is more important, I'll say this as an investor, is exactly what you said before, which I mean, just before that, which was now these companies will come to their next round of funding and they will need to show that they have been meeting the claims that they were making before. And I think a lot of investors, both existing and prospective, are going to be disappointed at what will be posted. And I think we will have a crisis around that. Whether NVIDIA will be able to backstop everything, I do not know, but we will definitely have a

Ben Lorica

right now. VCs only value growth. So here's how I would play the game, right? So I'm a Neolab. I have all this capacity. To show growth, I'll sell my capacity, but then I'll also release a small model to show, hey, look, we built a model. This is just the first. We're going to build more. But in…

Evangelos Simoudis

Yeah. Right. Yeah, I do not know. I mean, I guess I'm getting too carmagini for making optimistic statements these days.

Ben Lorica

Which, by the way, leads me to the third thing that has to go right, which plays into what everything we just have been talking about, which is the spot prices for compute capacity in these neocloud data centers has to continue to go up. To go up. Yeah. And what do you think?

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

More from The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

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