Opinion
Patel: Every semiconductor company except NVIDIA is terrible at software
“I would say every semiconductor company in the world sucks at software except for NVIDIA, right?”
Opinion
Patel: AMD lacks software talent and refuses to fund internal GPU clusters
“AMD is really good, but they're missing software. AMD has no clue how to do software, I think. They've got very few developers on it. They won't spend the money to build a GPU cluster for themselves so that they can develop software.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: Initial NVIDIA GPU cloud deployments suffer a 5% failure rate
“Google's brought in a level of reliability that NVIDIA GPUs don't have. You know, the dirty secret is to go ask people what the reliability rate of GPUs is in the cloud or in a deployment. It's like, oh God, it is not, they're reliable-ish, like, but like, esp…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: Meta and Microsoft may take free cash flows close to zero
“I think Meta and Microsoft may even take their free cash flows close to zero and just spent.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: NVIDIA's Jensen Huang only plans 12 to 18 months ahead
“Well, the funny thing is a lot of people at NVIDIA will say Jensen doesn't plan more than a year or year and a half out. Because they change things and they'll deploy them out that fast, right? No semi, every other semiconductor company takes years to deploy, …”
Insight
Patel: NVIDIA's inference moat relies on hardware rather than software
“NVIDIA's moat in, in inference is actually A lot smaller on software but it's a lot bigger on, hey, they just have the best hardware.”
Assertion Partly supported
Patel: NVIDIA is cutting Blackwell margins to compete with custom ASICs
“Like with Blackwell, not only is it way, way, way faster, anywhere from 10 to 15 times on really large models for inference, because they've optimized it for very large language models, they've also decided, hey, we're gonna cut our margin, too, somewhat, beca…”
Insight
Patel: Synthetic data generation enables continued AI scaling despite data limits
“You can create data out of thin air almost, right? In certain domains, right? And so this is the whole, the debate around scaling laws is how can we create data?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: AI models may improve faster over the next 6-12 months
“We may actually see models improve faster in the next six months to a year than we saw them improve in the last year. Because there's this new axis of synthetic data generation and the amount of compute we can throw at it is, we're still right here in the scal…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: AI labs have tapped out human-written internet text data
“Humans post on the internet every day, and we've already tapped that out, right? Kind of more or less on a text.”
Opinion
Patel: Wall Street hyperscaler CapEx estimates are far too low
“I think when you look at the streets estimates for capex, they're all far too low.”
Insight
Patel: Multi-gigawatt buildouts disprove claims that AI scaling is over
“Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a two gigawatt data center in Louisiana? Why is Amazon building these multi gigawatt data centers? Why is Google, why is Microsoft building multiple gigawatt data centers? Plus buying billions and billions of dollars of fiber to…”
Insight
Patel: AI pre-training gains are becoming logarithmically more expensive
“So, the whole paradigm of training, you know, pre-training is, is, is not slowing down. It's just, it's logarithmically more expensive each, for each generation, for each incremental improvement.”
Insight
Patel: Reasoning models like OpenAI o1 increase compute costs by 50x
“When I do this with O-one, right, because it's doing that thinking phase of 10,000... It spends a lot of memory on generating this KV cache and reading this KV cache constantly. Now the maximum batch size, i.e. Concurrent users I can have, is a fraction of tha…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: Reasoning models will see humongous performance gains within a year
“And so this, the performance improvements we'll get out of these models is, is humongous, right? In, in the coming, you know, six months to a year in certain benchmarks where you have functional verifiers.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: Microsoft earns 50% to 70% gross margins on OpenAI models
“Microsoft's earning 50 to 70% gross margins on OpenAI models, and that's with the profit share they get to get, or the share that they give OpenAI, right?”
Assertion Partly supported
Patel: Samsung holds almost zero share in HBM memory, especially at NVIDIA
“In HBM, Samsung has almost no share, right? Especially at NVIDIA”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: Standard high-end server memory yields higher gross margins than HBM
“The gross margins on HBM have not been fantastic. They've been good, but they haven't been fantastic. Actually, regular memory, high-end, like, server memory that is not HBM is actually higher gross margin than HBM.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: AMD will see less AI revenue from Microsoft and Meta in 2025
“Yes, I think they'll have they'll have a lot less success with Microsoft than they did this year. And they'll have less success than they did with Meta than they did this year.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Patel: Apple accounts for over 70% of Google's TPU rental revenue
“There's only one company accounts for over 70% of Google's revenue from TPUs as far as I understand, and that's Apple.”
Assertion Supported
Patel: Broadcom holds custom ASIC wins with Meta, OpenAI, and Apple
“Broadcom does have multiple custom ASIC wins, right? It's not just Google here. Meta's, Meta's ramping up mostly still for recommendation systems, but their custom chips are gonna get better. You know, there's other players like OpenAI who are making a chip, r…”
Assertion Supported
Patel: Broadcom is building an NVSwitch competitor for AMD and others
“Broadcom is making a Competitors to that, that they will cede to the market, right? Multiple companies will be using that. Not just, you know, AMD will be using that competitor to NVSwitch, but they're not making it themselves because they don't have the skill…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: Google TPU purchases will pause for six months over space limits
“Like in the next six months there is a bit of a slowdown in Google TPU purchases because they have no data center space. They want more. They just literally have no data center space to put them.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Patel: Only 5 to 10 of the 80 GPU NeoClouds will survive
“80 NeoClouds are not going to survive. Maybe five to 10 will. And that's because five of those are sovereign, right? And then the other five are like actually like market competitive.”
Dylan Patel