Casado: A $1B model training run economically justifies a custom ASIC
Martin Casado · Inside AI’s $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z · Feb 19, 2026 · at 23:17
Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), outlines the economic arithmetic behind custom AI silicon versus off-the-shelf NVIDIA GPUs.
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“No, no, no, a billion dollar training run, a one billion dollar training run, it makes sense to actually do a custom ASIC if you can do it in time. The question now is timeline. Not money. Cause just rough math. If it's a billion-dollar training run, then the inference for that model has to be over a billion, otherwise it won't be solvent. So let's assume it's, if you could save 20%, which you save much more than that with an ASIC, 20%, that's two hundred million dollars, you can tape out a chip for two hundred million dollars, right? So now you can literally, like, justify economically, not timeline-wise, that's a different issue, an ASIC per model.”
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