The AI gold rush: infrastructure, chips and the race to scale

What does AI look like on the ground in California? Fresh from a week on the US West Coast, Investment Manager Tom Miedema shares what he heard in boardrooms and labs – from data centre build‑outs and custom chips to the realities of software adoption and monetisation. This episode cuts through the hype to explore who is likely to win, where supply chains are straining, and why some AI milestones may be further away than headlines suggest. 

• Higher margin, lower risk – why we like/there’s a lot to like about Microsoft and Amazon’s data centre model 
• Winning the “daily knife fight” – why experience matters in the AI infrastructure build out
• AI is disrupting the software-as-a-service industry, but many incumbents are learning fast
• Monetisation of AI has been a slow burn, but an inflection point may be coming
• How “the march of the nines” explains why some AI progress might be further away than we think  

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Resources

• Dwarkesh Podcast
  • Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away 
  • Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
  • Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
  • Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
  • Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

The podcast is intended for investment professionals only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation. Any stock examples discussed are given in the context of the theme being explored, and the views expressed are those of the presenters at the time of the recording.