Chips, Memory, and Power | Pat Gelsinger

In a AI digital age, energy capacity equals economic capacity. Why build a new data center and buy the million GPUs if I can't power them? You're gonna see more and more defaults happening on many of those data center projects because the energy won't be there.

Whenever you have the technology to make something easy, that means the bottleneck moves somewhere else.

Nothing's a chip anymore. It's a rack. It took me three months to design it, but it's nine months until I can actually start to use it. Exactly how many major new memories have you had over the last thirty years?

Zero.

Zero.

Memory innovation for the first time in thirty years is nigh upon us. I declared the death of copper about twenty-five years ago. Eventually, I'll be right for all of us hardware guys. This is like renaissance in front of it.

Mm-hmm.

AI inference accelerator chips-

Yeah

... and I'm sure I don't even know them all. Why are you guys funding so many of those anyway?

Yeah. You funded your fair share too. [laughing]

Historically, there have not been a hundred competing processor vendors in any industry ever.

Yeah.

Is this a temporary thing-

Yeah

... it'll convert back to a few?

I see it as-

AI is making it faster to design chips, but actually building them, powering them, and connecting them may be getting harder. In this episode, a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller sit down with Pat Gelsinger, general partner at Playground Global and former CEO of Intel and VMware, to discuss the next bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. Pat takes us back to his early days designing Intel's processors when engineers were inventing the tools they needed to build the chips themselves. He explains why AI could bring a similar shift today, even as manufacturing timelines, memory bandwidth, and power become harder constraints. They also debate whether the explosion of specialized AI chips will last, why Pat believes memory innovation is finally approaching a breakthrough, and how optical networking could change the architecture of AI clusters. In drawing on their shared history at VMware, they close with a question: What would it look like to rebuild virtualization for a world where AI agents rather than humans are the primary users?

I'm here with our esteemed guest and dear friend and former boss, Mr. Pat Gelsinger. Welcome, Pat. Pat is currently the general partner at Playground Global, but as you're very, very well known in the industry for leading Intel, for being the CTO of Intel, of course, leading VMware and many other things. So welcome.

Hey, thank you, Raghu. Great to be with you and Guido. Right, and to me, this feels just a little bit like old home, right?

Yeah.

We superimposed a year of change, right? But you both look the same. I feel energetic, so let's dive in.

There has never been a day when you stop being energetic, so [laughs] there's no news there. But yeah, no, let's start actually from your Intel career. Recently, Andreessen Horowitz created this Horowitz Andreessen Academy-

Mm-hmm

... which was to find talented people between sixteen and twenty-two, and then put them into a, a modern educational setting, so they'd be well prepared for either doing things on their own or joining the