Casado: Multibillion-dollar AI training costs justify building per-model custom ASICs
Martin Casado · Why Top Founders Are Racing Into AI Infrastructure · Aug 28, 2026 · at 26:48
Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz explains the shifting economic scale of frontier AI training and inference during an episode about AI datacenter infrastructure.
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“Today to build a frontier model costs, let's say, three to five billion dollars, right? So, and let's, you know, and that's to train it. And so the inference has to pay back at least that. Of course, right? You know, in order for any of this stuff to be viable, let's say two times that. So let's say that now Infraint has to make ten billion dollars. So if you can save 20% of efficiency on that, that's two billion dollars. And you can easily build an ASIC for two billion dollars, right? So it's, so we've actually gotten to this interesting point in the industry where it actually makes sense to build an ASIC per model, just because the amount of capital investment in that model.”
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