25 October 2026
158 new episodes (154 hours listening) published by the 50 podcasts on the list. 42 highlight clips below (126 mins total).
Investment 25 October 2026 · 42 clips
20VC
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
Jason Lemkin is a SaaS investor whose portfolio includes Algolia, Talkdesk, RevenueCat and Salesloft. Rory O'Driscoll is a General Partner at Scale, where he led investments in Bill.com, Box, DocuSign and WalkMe.
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1 of 3 contrarian
Rory O'Driscoll of Scale says this year's biggest venture rounds are almost certainly priced out of line with public comparables, and only years of fast growth can close the gap.
His example is a defence contractor: mature at $2 billion of revenue it is worth $8 billion at best, and a run to $20 billion with a line to the Pentagon might justify a venture price, with little help likely from multiple expansion in a richly priced US market. Jason Lemkin's cases are Anduril at $90 billion, about 40 times revenue, and AI-native marketing companies whose listed peers, HubSpot and Klaviyo, trade below three times.
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2 of 3 framework
Rory O'Driscoll of Scale reckons a venture firm needs roughly $800 million to $1 billion of fee income before a listing makes sense, because public investors pay for management fees and give carried interest little credit.
Listed alternative managers trade at four or five times revenue at best, and at a 2% fee that income implies tens of billions under management, a scale he thinks Andreessen Horowitz could reach and few others will. His larger objection is cultural: a listed firm must keep growing assets and launching funds, and is likely to turn more risk-averse in doing so.
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3 of 3 prediction
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll expect venture's last five years to end with growth-stage investing out-returning early stage, the reverse of what a rational capital market should pay.
On the panel's account, $50 million to $100 million seed prices and multi-stage firms squeezing allocations leave a seed fund with $300,000 to $500,000 in a company later valued at $18 billion, too little to move the fund. At the other end, a figure quoted on the show takes SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI from about $400 billion combined three years ago to $4 trillion to $5 trillion, nearly all created at the latest stage.
The Meb Faber Show
Vincent DeluardStoneX
Vincent Deluard is Director of Global Macro Strategy at StoneX, a Fortune 100 firm active across stocks, bonds, futures, options and commodities whose desk trades with Latin American pension funds and institutions.
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1 of 3 current issue
Vincent Deluard finds the average UK defined benefit pension fund has cut domestic shares from 50% of its assets 20 years ago to 5%, on UK statistics office survey data.
He puts it down to ageing schemes moving from shares to bonds, which he thinks they did by selling the home market and keeping overseas equities, after foreign investors had already left following Brexit. With the UK about 2% of global market capitalisation on his figure, below its share of world GDP, he argues it is ahead of Europe's debt cycle, having had its Truss moment, and would gain from a eurozone crisis.
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2 of 3 current issue
Growth in US personal income tax collections has slowed from 8 to 9% at the start of the year to about 5%, which Vincent Deluard takes as his gut feel for inflation.
On his reading most workers are making no real progress, official real wages have now fallen for four months, and consumption has held up because households are drawing on investment accounts and 401(k)s, which he likens to the home-equity withdrawals of 2006 and 2007. Widening consumer credit spreads, he says, argue against reading higher yields as a growth story.
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3 of 3 current issue
Vincent Deluard puts the oil price the world economy actually pays at $150 to $200 a barrel, once refining margins, freight and insurance are added to crude delivered in Asia.
Two buffers, on his account, have held crude below what a months-long Hormuz closure would imply: global inventories with US strategic reserve releases, and collapsed Chinese buying. Both are running out, he says, with the reserve near its operating minimum and China's August imports picking up, while Chinese producer prices up 5 to 6% and a rising yuan now export inflation.
Trillions (Bloomberg)
Isabelle LeeBloomberg
Isabelle Lee is a markets reporter for Bloomberg Television.
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current issue
UC Investments, the University of California's investment arm, seeded State Street's new 90/10 ETF with $2.5 billion at a fee of 6 basis points.
The Trillions hosts read it as an access vehicle: the fund is apparently modelled on UC's Blue and Gold endowment pool, an institution that size could probably buy S&P 500 exposure for about 2 basis points, and their guess is that the ETF lets members of the pool get in and out easily. They doubt it catches on more widely, since the ESG ETFs that European pensions backed with about $2 billion, as they recall, did not.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
MacroVoices
Anas Alhajji and Louis-Vincent GaveEnergy Outlook Advisors; Gavekal
Anas Alhajji founded Energy Outlook Advisors, which publishes an energy newsletter for institutional investors, and had just returned from Riyadh Energy Week. Louis-Vincent Gave is founder and chief executive of Gavekal, which publishes research for institutional investors and runs China and Asian equity and fixed income funds.
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1 of 2 current issue
Louis-Vincent Gave argues France has an emerging-market debt crisis on a budget deficit of 5% of GDP, where the US runs 7% untroubled, because France borrows in a currency it cannot print.
French tax receipts are already about 44% of GDP against about 24 to 25% in the US, Gave says, so higher taxes would raise less; and most French debt is held by foreigners, for whom owning it has become a career risk after years of the crisis being forecast in the financial press.
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2 of 2 current issue
Crude oil flows through Hormuz are running at 80 to 90% of pre-conflict levels but refined products only 25 to 35%, Anas Alhajji reports US energy secretary Chris Wright as saying.
Alhajji grants there is double counting in the crude figure and that some of the statements rest on single nights, but says the products gap is where the diesel shortage sits: output from the Gulf's refineries has not been replaced. He adds that Germany's economy minister told two Riyadh conferences that Germany plans to bring refineries closed under climate policy back online for energy security.
The Compound and Friends
Jill SchlesingerCBS News
Emmy and Gracie award-winning business analyst for CBS News, who hosted the syndicated Jill on Money radio show for 15 years. Before media she spent 14 years as co-owner and chief investment officer of an independent investment advisory firm, after starting out trading options in New York.
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current issue
Meta reported its first negative free cash flow quarter since 2012, as AI spending outran a business the hosts count among the three most profitable in history.
On the hosts' reading of the call, ad impressions rose 10% and average price per ad 14% from a year earlier, which they count as AI paying back inside the ad business, while a new share class prepares Meta to raise equity for the build-out with less dilution of Zuckerberg's votes. The stock swung about 14% overnight, from near 750 to 650.
The Real Eisman Playbook
AI Narrative Switched, Debt Yields Spike | The Weekly Wrap
The Weekly Wrap is Eisman's solo review of the week's markets and earnings.
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1 of 2 current issue
Steve Eisman says the jump in CoreWeave's cost of debt, from 9% to 15%, drove the AI sell-off of the past two weeks more than any earnings result.
On his account the build-out has turned much of tech from a capital-light into a capital-heavy business. The hyperscalers can fund it, but neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Nebius lack strong balance sheets, and CoreWeave would raise new debt, if it can, at 15%, a level at which he believes data centre economics do not work; bond buyers want the arithmetic, and CoreWeave's debt price is his gauge.
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2 of 2 current issue
Meta has agreed to spend about $825 billion in the future on leases and contracts, mostly for AI computing power.
Steve Eisman reads the commitment as why the stock fell after strong results: revenue rose 26% to $64.6 billion and the average price per ad rose 14%, which he says seems to show Meta's AI products helping advertising, but costs rose 68% and on his account Meta no longer has positive cash flow to carry the commitment. He also thinks agentic apps such as Meta's Muse have no moats.
Masters in Business (Ritholtz)
Robin WigglesworthFinancial Times
Editor of FT Alphaville, the Financial Times finance blog, and author of A Fabulous Debt, a history of the bond market, and Trillions (2021) on index funds. He covered capital markets for the FT through the eurozone crisis before heading its markets team in New York.
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1 of 2 current issue
Robin Wigglesworth puts bond issuance by the AI hyperscalers at around $500 billion this year, against roughly $200 billion last year.
His worry is how the build-out is paid for: capex booms financed with debt have historically ended badly, and rail and cable at least left assets that outlast a GPU. He is not alarmed yet, because the issuers still generate heavy cash and the rating agencies are reading through to their off-balance-sheet commitments, with Oracle looking like the weaker member of the group.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
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2 of 2 framework
Robin Wigglesworth puts US federal interest costs at about 3.5% of GDP, below the roughly 5% of GDP at which other countries have historically shown signs of strain.
He discards debt to GDP as a measure because it says nothing about a country's ability to carry the debt; servicing has risen from about 2.5% a few years ago, and he recalls a CBO projection reaching around 5% in 10 to 12 years. Britain under Thatcher in 1980 turned back at that point, while Canada let it snowball into the mid-1990s.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
a16z
Andy JassyAmazon
Chief executive of Amazon since 2021, having joined the company 29 years ago as an assistant product manager; Amazon expects about $220 billion of capex in 2026, and AWS grew 36.7% last quarter on a $169 billion annual run rate.
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explainer
Amazon builds data centre shells two years ahead of use but orders servers only months ahead, against customer demand it can already see.
Jassy puts server and networking gear at about three years to break even on a useful life of five to six years, against deals that mostly run five years, while the shell is a one-off asset lasting about 30 years. Building that many sites at once pulls free cash flow down in the early years, before the later sites are monetised.
The Cognitive Revolution
Zvi Mowshowitz, Evan Conrad and Lonis HamailiSF Compute, Cambrian
Evan Conrad is co-founder and chief executive of SF Compute, which operates GPU clusters for their owners and runs a market where compute contracts are bought and resold. Lonis Hamaili is managing partner of Cambrian, a fund built on the thesis that the physical supply chain behind AI will capture more value than the labs; Zvi Mowshowitz writes about frontier AI at Don't Worry About the Vase.
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explainer
SF Compute's Evan Conrad says almost no AI lab has the credit that compute lenders underwrite, since a lender cannot value a GPU cluster it repossesses.
Conrad traces the three- to five-year terms and large deposits to that gap: lenders and clouds want an investment-grade tenant such as Meta or Google, and a lab that is not one struggles unless it raises enough to prepay a three-year contract in cash. On his account the giant pre-revenue rounds are survivorship, and without the collateral market his firm is building, AI start-ups go the way of new chip fabs, priced out by capex.
Latent Space
Erik BernhardssonModal
Erik Bernhardsson is chief executive of Modal, which rents GPU capacity from almost 25 clouds, mostly on three-year terms, and resells it on demand to AI companies. He spent seven years at Spotify, most of them building its music recommendation system, and five as chief technology officer of Better.com.
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1 of 2 explainer
Erik Bernhardsson says neoclouds grow by pre-selling GPUs they have not yet bought, taking a multi-year contract from a large AI buyer to Wall Street to raise the money for the hardware.
That is how Nscale reached, on his loose figure, hundreds of billions of dollars of pipeline with barely any capacity, and how the larger neoclouds came to use GPUs as loan collateral. He welcomes the startups building GPU price indices and derivatives, since risk at this scale needs hedging and insurance, but doubts compute becomes a Brent-style traded commodity when chips differ by network, location, storage and reliability.
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2 of 2 contrarian
Erik Bernhardsson worries more about GPU prices collapsing than rising, because a collapse would hurt everyone locked into long supply contracts.
He does not expect it soon: Nvidia ships several hundred thousand Blackwells a month, anyone paying the top rate can get capacity, and the shortage reads to him partly as a run on the bank, which he says could last anywhere from another 6 to 36 months. Until then the scarcity rent goes mostly to Nvidia and partly to the neoclouds, and Modal's fixed-rate reservations mean it gains while scarcity lasts.
Merryn Talks Money
Sam UnstedBloomberg
Sam Unsted is co-editor of Bloomberg's Markets Today blog and writes on UK stocks, economics, central banks and global markets.
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current issue
Bloomberg's Sam Unsted says the AI build-out is probably cracking first at the neoclouds, the heavily indebted data centre operators between the hyperscalers and the model labs.
Unsted's evidence is a run of failed listings, with Firmus pulling its Australian IPO and a flop in South Korea, and Nscale losing a Microsoft data centre project when, on Unsted's recollection of the week's reporting, more than 80% of its revenue comes from Microsoft and Anthropic. The neoclouds need those listings to shore up their balance sheets, and grid connections are slowing the build.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
All-In
Nikesh AroraPalo Alto Networks
Chief executive of Palo Alto Networks. He hosted a gathering of chief information officers the week before the show and says his company runs 10 to 20 megawatts of AI inference.
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current issue
Chamath Palihapitiya estimates that 1% of companies account for 90% of AI token spending, most of it from unprofitable venture-backed startups.
On the hosts' account the money runs in a loop: pension funds and foundations fund venture firms, startups spend it on AI, and the revenue that shows helps them raise again, without the profitable business that sat under early cloud. Ramp's chief economist found the estimate broadly right, and Ramp's unpublished data shows top spenders moving toward their own GPUs and open models; one large US bank has built six data centres of its own.
Hidden Forces
Philipp Carlsson-SzlezakBoston Consulting Group
Global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group, who splits his time between publishing research and advising boards and executives on the global economy. Author of Shocks, Crises and False Alarms (2024) and co-author of the recent paper The Kids Are Alright.
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contrarian
Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak finds incomes and balance sheets at the bottom of the US distribution have strengthened since 2020, so the official data show no downward leg to the K-shaped economy.
His evidence beyond the indexed quintiles is the last earnings season, strong across virtually every subsector, which a consumer economy carried by a few rich households could not produce. He concedes that a 20% rise on a $20,000 income makes nobody rich overnight, and that a quarter of people see real wages fall in any given year, as they did twenty and ten years ago.
Top Traders Unplugged
Jesper Koll
Jesper Koll has lived in Japan since the mid-1980s and has been head of research and chief strategist at JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch. He works with an activist fund in Japan and advises the Governor of Tokyo and, at times, the finance minister.
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1 of 2 contrarian
Jesper Koll says Japan's private sector has saved 140 yen for every 100 yen of public debt taken on over the past 20 years.
On his account a debt crisis comes to a country that runs balance of payments deficits and must fight for capital, as the UK does, while Japanese banks have excess deposits. The squeeze he concedes is fiscal: servicing the debt takes just under a quarter of the prime minister's budget, and rising rates tighten it.
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2 of 2 framework
Jesper Koll finds only 37% of Japan's listed companies earn most of their revenue in the sector they are listed under, against about 80% in the US.
Koll's driver of change is age: over the past 18 months departing chief executives of quoted firms averaged 67 and their successors 52, a generation without the bubble-era pride and readier to ask why a company keeps eight divisions when three make money. Add labour scarcity and a political push to make assets work harder, and he sees whole industries opening to consolidation.
20VC
Naveen RaoUnconventional AI
Founder and chief executive of Unconventional AI, an AI hardware start-up whose last round valued it close to $5 billion. He previously founded Nervana Systems, acquired by Intel, and co-founded MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion, where he then served as VP of AI.
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1 of 2 current issue
Naveen Rao says AI data centres have so far been powered from the US grid's idle headroom, about 900 gigawatts of average output against a peak capacity of 1.2 to 1.3 terawatts.
On his account a gigawatt of new capacity costs about $50 billion to build, more than the $20 to $30 billion of a semiconductor fab, where the headroom used so far was what could be had quickly. He sets that against China, which built six times faster for 20 years and passed total US capacity, he thinks in 2023.
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2 of 2 current issue
Naveen Rao says the behind-the-meter deals he hears of show data centres already paying more per kilowatt hour than other grid users.
He expects the grid's spare capacity to run out within a few years and puts US new build at maybe 10 gigawatts a year, which he prices at half a trillion dollars. Data centres can outbid other users, on his rough figure, because compute sells for about five times the cost of the electricity in it, leaving room to pay 30% to 40% more.
Excess Returns
Ted MortonsonBaird
Technology strategist at Baird who has covered the sector for close to three decades and, on his own account, speaks with about a hundred of the leading institutional technology portfolio managers. A Naval Academy graduate, he flew for the US Navy.
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1 of 2 current issue
Ted Mortonson says the tech portfolio managers he speaks to would generally have to sell holdings they like to buy a cluster of large AI listings, since they keep no more than 4% of their portfolios in cash.
He counts about 20 candidates, Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks among them, with five large IPOs already postponed, and expects strain only if they arrive within a quarter or two. He adds that these managers will not pay up to give venture and private equity backers their exit, and that allocations will probably be concentrated in 20 to 30 specialist funds.
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2 of 2 current issue
Ted Mortonson says most of the AI infrastructure suppliers he follows can deliver only about 70% of contracted compute demand, with the other 30% going into backlog.
His case is that the build-out needs both the equity and the debt windows to stay open through another one to two years of capex and negative free cash flow, because the infrastructure earns its return only with enterprise adoption. He puts Anthropic's likely raise at $80 billion to $100 billion and wants asset managers such as Apollo, BlackRock and Blackstone, the banks and the government sharing the debt.
All-In
Arvind Krishna and Nikesh Arora
Arvind Krishna speaks for IBM, whose mainframe line he puts at 65 years old. Nikesh Arora runs a cybersecurity company that inspects endpoint traffic for $20 to $30 per device a year and was among a small group given early access to Mythos.
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prediction
Arvind Krishna expects enterprises using 500 to 5,000 software vendors to consolidate onto five to 10 platforms as AI replaces the rest.
His mechanism is distribution cost: as the value of each piece of software falls, it cannot pay for its own sales effort, so spend moves to a few platforms, over six months or six years. He expects software that must be right to one error in 10 to the 15th, the retail-banking database lookup or closing the books, to be harder to replace, and Arora finds the terminal value of most software hard to judge now.
Forward Guidance
The Only Way Out Is Through | Weekly Roundup
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1 of 2 current issue
Forward Guidance's hosts put Brent's premium over US crude at $13 to $14 a barrel, up from $2 to $4 before the war.
Part of the gap is supply chains, but they would not be surprised if some of it is the market front-running a US export ban widening from refined products to crude, with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down to about 70 days of demand, its lowest in over 20 years and roughly a sixteenth the size of China's. On their account each new reserve release and political reassurance has been met with a higher price.
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2 of 2 explainer
Forward Guidance's hosts argue that freight costs this high may be capping crude prices somewhat, which would leave room for oil to rise if shipping eases.
A buyer pays for a delivered barrel, $200 in their hypothetical, and a large freight charge takes a bigger slice of it, cutting what can be bid for the crude itself. They call it a logistics story as much as a supply one: the world has thousands of tankers but few very large crude carriers, and losing a small share of those tightens freight quickly.
Odd Lots
Richard MottNorth Pond
Richard Mott has owned North Pond, a farm-to-table restaurant in Chicago's Lincoln Park, since it opened in 1997, and owns Spark Shared Kitchen, a catering facility and incubator for food businesses. He started in 1981 with a coffee shop at the University of Chicago business school and grew it into a chain of more than 20 campus shops.
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current issue
Richard Mott says wine has fallen to 24% of North Pond's sales in the last 18 months, after holding at 33% to 34% for 28 years.
On Mott's numbers an average bottle, at about $110, earns about the same margin as a $130 five-course dinner that takes nine or ten cooks to make, yet costs two minutes of a waiter's time. He puts the fall down to younger guests drinking less, health and cannabis alternatives, and has added a non-alcoholic cocktail menu and is seeking approval for THC drinks.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
Dwarkesh Podcast
Chris Auth, Kevin Fischer, Jack Kavalieros, Tyler Osborn, Pushkar RanadeIntel
Pushkar Ranade is Intel's chief technology officer and Chris Auth leads development of the processes Intel currently manufactures; the others are engineers from Intel's fab, research lab and advanced packaging group, interviewed over a two-day tour of its most advanced fab.
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explainer
Intel's CTO Pushkar Ranade puts the fixed share of a leading-edge fab's costs at about 80% once it is built, which he says makes foundries probably the purest scale business in advanced manufacturing.
On his account every extra point of utilisation adds far more to revenue than to cost, and lifting die yield from 60% to 65% or 70% raises output from the same footprint by more than the percentage suggests. The same arithmetic took the industry from about 20 foundries 40 years ago to three at the advanced node, with TSMC shipping upwards of three times Intel's leading-edge wafers.
AI 25 October 2026 · 42 clips
No Priors
George KurtzCrowdStrike
George Kurtz is president and chief executive of CrowdStrike, which he has run for 15 years, and before that founded Foundstone; he has worked in security for more than 30 years.
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1 of 2 current issue
CrowdStrike finds attackers who land on a system now move on to the next in 29 minutes on average and in as little as 27 seconds, where it used to take hours or days.
Kurtz puts much of the attack work on open-weight models such as GLM and Qwen, often with safeguards stripped out or built for red-teaming, because frontier models refuse even benign security requests. Each intrusion is driven by prompts instead of reusable malware, and so leaves no common signature for defenders to match.
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2 of 2 current issue
George Kurtz reports a big bank's CIO, after token bills ran out of control, keeping frontier models for revenue-earning work and moving everything else to open-weight models the bank post-trains itself.
The bank's reasoning, as Kurtz relays it, is that open-weight models running about three months behind the frontier are good enough for most tasks, and he says he hears the same from customer after customer. He expects local models on employees' machines within two years, perhaps mixed with last-mile routing to frontier labs.
No Priors
Dane KnechtCloudflare
Dane Knecht is chief technology officer of Cloudflare, a company of about 5,000 people whose network sits in front of sites from enterprise customers down to free accounts, which gives it a wide view of attacks across the internet.
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1 of 2 current issue
Cloudflare says flaws as serious as Log4j, which called all hands on deck at the company perhaps once a year, now arrive weekly.
Knecht dates the rise in reported vulnerabilities to the last three to six months and says not all of them are made public. He expects more than half of engineering time to go to security over the next 18 months, ending once AI has been through most existing code and found most of the bugs.
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2 of 2 current issue
Cloudflare emails staff who pass $300 of AI token spend in a day, tells their manager at about $500 and a vice-president at $1,000.
Knecht says Cloudflare keeps no token leaderboard and judges staff on what they ship, the alerts rarely reach the top tier, and most people who trip them had not noticed and are glad to be told. Staff still choose the model for each task, frontier models for planning and review and possibly open models in between, which he expects to give way to automatic routing with more governance.
Big Technology Podcast
Alex StamosCognition
Alex Stamos is chief information security officer at Cognition, where helping large companies refactor old software is a big part of the business, and he has taught at Stanford.
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current issue
Cloudflare counted thousands of attempts to exploit the PHP flaw in the 10 hours before it was announced, hundreds of thousands within two hours of the announcement, and millions since.
Stamos says the incident response firms that would investigate, Mandiant and CrowdStrike among them, were fully booked before this, leaving companies without their own forensics team on their own. He expects breach notices to arrive over months, many from companies that patched within 48 hours without noticing someone had already got in.
All-In
Nikesh AroraPalo Alto Networks
Chief executive of Palo Alto Networks. He hosted a gathering of chief information officers the week before the show and says his company runs 10 to 20 megawatts of AI inference.
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explainer
Nikesh Arora says a model given enough compute cracked the PHP weakness behind this week's attacks, a flaw identified years ago and set aside as impractical.
Frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and probably Google can now find vulnerabilities and chain several into an attack path when given compute and persistence. Once a fix ships, attackers read the patch to work out the flaw it closes, and every unpatched system becomes a target the day the patch appears.
a16z
Andy JassyAmazon
Chief executive of Amazon since 2021, having joined the company 29 years ago as an assistant product manager; Amazon expects about $220 billion of capex in 2026, and AWS grew 36.7% last quarter on a $169 billion annual run rate.
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current issue
Amazon says AWS capacity for 2026 is sold out, 2027 is largely sold and a good part of 2028 is already taken.
Jassy says Amazon will not price out its existing customers to serve labs willing to pay almost anything, and has to split scarce memory between AI accelerators and the core business. He thinks supply constraints will run past 2027, in different components for several years, and says Amazon could spend a lot more than $220 billion and probably still not satisfy all the demand.
All-In
Arvind Krishna and Nikesh Arora
Arvind Krishna speaks for IBM, whose mainframe line he puts at 65 years old. Nikesh Arora runs a cybersecurity company that inspects endpoint traffic for $20 to $30 per device a year and was among a small group given early access to Mythos.
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prediction
Arvind Krishna, unsure of the exact figure, puts the share of all AI token usage that will go to open-weight models at 75% to 90%.
He rests it on cost and control: a Chinese model of about 800 billion parameters, run on an enterprise's own GPUs, can cost about $1 to $2 per million tokens against $20 to $50 for closed models, and running it in-house keeps the chain of thought out of another firm's logs. Arora's firm already inspects endpoint traffic with small task-specific systems and saves the frontier for an active breach.
Dwarkesh Podcast
Chris Auth, Kevin Fischer, Jack Kavalieros, Tyler Osborn, Pushkar RanadeIntel
Pushkar Ranade is Intel's chief technology officer and Chris Auth leads development of the processes Intel currently manufactures; the others are engineers from Intel's fab, research lab and advanced packaging group, interviewed over a two-day tour of its most advanced fab.
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1 of 2 current issue
Intel's CTO Pushkar Ranade puts the ceiling on Intel's leading-edge wafer output at probably double today's, given the chipmaking tools that exist, against AI compute that has tripled every year for a decade.
A process, once locked, needs one specific tool from one supplier, and ASML builds fewer than 100 EUV machines a year to be shared by Intel, TSMC and the memory makers. Moving from 18A to 14A reuses perhaps 80% of the tool set, and on Ranade's account output grows only if the equipment makers and their own suppliers grow too.
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2 of 2 prediction
Intel's CTO Pushkar Ranade judges the shortage of memory chips to be larger today than the shortage of compute.
Tools ordered now take about 18 months to arrive and a new fab shell runs to the end of the decade, so output can beat forecasts next year but not by much in 2030 unless the whole supply chain ramps up quickly. In hindsight Intel's sale of its flash business was probably mistimed, and the conversation treats Elon Musk's planned Terafab as guaranteed supply for one buyer, not extra silicon, while tools are the constraint.