Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dylan Patel - Inside the Trillion-Dollar AI Buildout - [Invest Like the Best, EP.442]

1654 snips
Sep 30, 2025
In this discussion, Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis, dives into the intricacies of the semiconductor supply chain and AI infrastructure. He analyzes the interconnected strategies among OpenAI, Nvidia, and Oracle, highlighting how compute capacity drives their deals. Dylan shares insights on current high-value AI applications, the significance of reinforcement learning, and the implications of supply chain bottlenecks. He also contrasts US and Chinese approaches to AI, offering a comprehensive view of the industry's landscape and future opportunities.
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INSIGHT

Compute Precedes Business

  • OpenAI's core problem is insatiable compute demand that must be provisioned before new use cases emerge.
  • Winning AI requires sequencing massive infrastructure ahead of revenue and adoption curves.
INSIGHT

Infrastructure Is Long-Term Rental Economics

  • Big AI capacity deals are effectively multi-year rental economics with enormous cashflow commitments.
  • Those commitments force partnerships where infrastructure providers frontload capex and take concentrated risk.
INSIGHT

Chip Vendors Capture The CapEx Funnel

  • GPU manufacturers capture outsized share of data center CapEx and gross profit when clusters are built.
  • Deals can look like 'round-tripping' but fundamentally allocate huge upfront CapEx to chip vendors.
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