Semiconductors

“So if you look at areas that are obviously very interesting right now, because everybody needs improvement there, the big ones to everybody are semi and energy, and those are precisely right in our wheelhouse.”

“So, I think sentiment's very negative. I've kind of had this Huge up, parabolic up move the last few months, and likely a lot of retail and hedge funds piled in, and we were seeing this unwind now.”

“I think you could in, in the near future with some of the systems that have been recommended today, you would see like a two to five X generally, especially when you think about integration in these materials, you need barrier layers and there's all these inte…”

“Today, for example, in 12 months now, we have almost nothing in semiconductors. We have almost nothing in tech.”

“In summer of twenty-twenty-two, we started buying semiconductors, and we had no exposures. I felt like, great job, and we walk on water. In October, this whole thing heated up between US and China, the restrictions, and the stocks went free-fall. They got very…”

“Your footprint, you're like a semiconductor or technology footprint as an individual is about to expand by like 10 X because you used to have a couple of devices. Maybe you're someone has an iPad too. So you have X a little more, but like three or four devices…”

“As you're pointing out, you're going from systems that aren't just writing essays, not just writing software, but to literally generating matter. And I think it has pretty profound implications to semiconductors, airspace, energy.”

“China, China has by far the most advanced supply chain in semiconductors if you just look at China itself, right?”

“More or less we've reached the limits of You know, scaling things down, and now we are trying to improve further by new materials, so that's the fundamental materials problem.”

“We have seen now recently a more formalized collaboration between the six IITs in India and some of our technical universities in the Netherlands. With a specific focus on semiconductors.”

“I think in semiconductors, you will see something like that with a place like Bangalore, for example, in chip design. Honestly, the talent is already here. It's already happening here. Manufacturing maybe not so much in Karnataka, but maybe more in Gujarat whe…”

“Data centers, energy, obviously, you have another guest who talked about it's not an issue for China, right? It's somewhere they could build as many data centers as they want, as long as they can get the chips. That's the bigger issue.”

“So in 2015, they made these five-year plans for two, 20 20 and 20 20 five, where they set the percentage of semiconductors they wanted domestically produced. And they've missed the goal both times.”

“China has the most vertical stack and semiconductors today.”

“The collective total amount of, like, CapEx that has been spent in Taiwan is, like, five hundred billion plus, right? Across the industry, across all the companies that are making semiconductors in Taiwan.”

“The baton got passed from semiconductor shortages in 23 to power and data centers in 24, 25. 26, we're still, we're swinging the pendulum, but it will fully beat semiconductors again in 27, right?”

“China is, like, the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors, and it has been since 2005, so they want to buy semiconductors. Obviously US trade policy oscillates, but semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China.”

“In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported Three hundred and fifty billion worth of semiconductors which was more than the value of the crude oil it imported that year.”

“And we're probably one of the few semiconductor companies that go from five Watts To your earbud, now to 500 watts, when you think about a data center.”

“Semiconductors now are cheaper than they were 20 years ago.”

“So you've got kind of a down the stack question, which might end up looking like semiconductors or aircraft or something where it's just, there's no network effects, it's just really expensive. And maybe, you know, there's only two people who make aircraft. Th…”

“I find that many companies have, really have excess demand, which is a very rare problem to have, but so many people want more OM inference, want more tokens generated, and we just don't have the semiconductors and data centers and electricity to meet the dema…”

“I think my sense is AI is in that kind of, you know, semiconductor like place where you have this meta process that's very likely to continue scaling exponentially for a very long time.”

“Like we're coming to the end of Moore's law. We cannot make smaller transistors. That's going to get really, really painful in the next decade.”

“The only reason why there are so many chips factory getting back to the US is because war is chips and chips is war. Like, if you put chips on a drone, you basically have something that is better than airplanes. And so, We will be forced to change our producti…”

“Semiconductor doesn't create, you know, many, many jobs. Because it's very highly automated, especially manufacturing is very highly automated and so on.”

“And I think, you know, semiconductor will eventually be something like that. I, you know, I believe, right? Where, you know, it will become more and more affordable, right?... So I think, you know, India will democratize a lot of this, you know, in my opinion.…”

“Even see, China started their semiconductor program 20 years back. They're still not able to compete on that.”

“And if we take the philosophy of we want to be a little like Nike, start by selling it to the Olympic athletes and get everyone to buy it. That was sort of the proving ground. And so we still have a few semiconductor companies, you know, that we're scaling up …”

“I'd go the level below semis. I think semiconductors that, that fit into the hardware that Tom's talking about.”

“I guess what I'm convinced of, because of the fact that 19, the last 20 times when the market did recover tech work, because semis have sold off so much, and because they ultimately are growing faster relative to the economy than they did previously, that semi…”

“If you look at semiconductors, 90%, I don't know if you know this statistic, 90% of chip design goes through India, including the Chinese trips.”

“In the meantime, what we do know is that there are constraints and what those constraints are shifting. Obviously they started on the semi side. Now it's more on the power side.”

“You can now differentiate your products based on the application and it is not too expensive to do that now.”

“No, today, almost hundred percent semiconductor is important. Nothing is made here. Hundred percent.”

“I mean, they are throwing a number like our import bill for semiconductor is I think, forty-five billion or something like that. 45, fifty billion.”

“Even better in the notion that gross margins of software can be 80 to 90%, not 50%, but I would back that down because it doesn't have the sort of moat defensibility characteristics that being able to plow your Capex into manufacturing capability does.”

“It's really no different than growing other other semiconductor materials. If you're growing silicon or silicon carbide or gallium arsenide or indium phosphide, any of these electronic substrates you start with a seed crystal and then you use a typically a, yo…”

“I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.”

“I think the initial knee-jerk reaction will be sell Apple, sell semiconductors and in spades, because they've all done so well over the last several years even with the President Biden's tariffs, because we know that he kept a lot of tariffs on, but, you know,…”

“Instead you use state capital on what you see as strategically important domains, semiconductors, strategically important. You need certain kinds of dependencies to go. There may be others. There may be critical minerals where you support. You don't need to do…”

“And then what I'm mostly looking for, where are the choke points right now? And there's a bunch. It's semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment. There's only a handful of companies that are good at that. There's only three big public clouds. There's o…”

“So a lot of East Asian countries did understand that they had, for example, Taiwan, et cetera, had a very liberal trade policies from the 19 fifties, which people don't see when they analyze Taiwan. They say, Oh, today it has become powerhouse on semiconductor…”

“Where oil reserves are has defined geopolitics for 50 years. Where technology and fabs are for the future is more important.”

“There's still, you know, a good, I don't know, 10 years of shrinking possible.”

“Japanese companies are absolutely critical players in the value chain for semiconductor production. Whether it's the production equipment that's used in lithography or etching or inspection or cleaning or dicing or whatever it may be, or whether it's the mater…”

“Get those two things completely under us control. On top of energy independence, and honestly, we would be a dominant world power for the next 200 years on our terms.”

“We learned that our supply chain was stretched all the way back to China, that we couldn't get certain supplies. In other parts of the world, it was an unreliable supply chain, and we really started looking hard at what the impacts would be, and we're looking …”

“Well, so ironically, so, so ironically, that's a completely different issue, in that it's most, in that it's mostly older generation chips. I mean, I'm not a semiconductor analyst, but most of what this was, and particularly in, like, the car industry, this wa…”

“China's trying its best to get to those sophisticated levels below five nanometer chip level, which it can't. And I think it's going to take a long time for them to do that. Much longer than people think. There's no Moore's law in getting to that level. And so…”

“This time, we have, you know, at least a half dozen separate technologies and changes driving all these opportunities, so the dependence on the semiconductors in the cycle is Going away.”

“Steve Jobs, 1985, Steve Jobs would have wanted to manufacture the semiconductors himself.”

“It's a way to effectively index machine learning, because I think it's very hard to invest in, quote, unquote, a machine learning company.”

“I'm the one who stumbled across the paper in the Stanford archives that Doug Engelbart wrote in 1960, where he looked at this brand new technology of semiconductors, and he pointed out that it scales.”

“Very few VCs will touch semiconductors, and it's a core innovation. Hardware is a core innovation on which software resides. So we do need to see continued innovation at the bottom layers. But that has sort of almost gone away from the VC ecosystem.”