The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 66 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Patel: AI software industry could hit $100 billion ARR this year
“I think the industry could hit a hundred billion ARR by the end of this year, like 45, 50 for open AI, like 35, 40 for anthropic.”
Patel: New AI chip startups like Etched have under 1% success chance
“I don't know what a venture capitalist views as like likely chances of succeeding, but I think all of them are less than one percent.”
Patel: Huawei used shell companies to procure TSMC chips and Korean HBM
“Well, actually they were using shell companies to get chips from TSMC and using Different methods of like sneaking HBM, which is memory from, you know, Korea through Taiwan to China, right?”
Patel: Without AI leadership, China will overtake the US as hegemon
“But without AI, China definitely will rise to be the global hegemony. They're just gonna outrun America.”
Patel: Companies no longer need junior analysts due to AI automation
“This is Claude code now. You don't need junior analysts.”
Patel: Many tech companies have stopped hiring L4 software engineers
“Just like a lot of companies have stopped hiring L four engineers because it's useless.”
Patel: Groq chips cannot cost-effectively perform general-purpose large model inference
“In a general purpose workload, crock. Grok doesn't work, right? You know, it can't train, it can't, you know, it can't inference really, really large models cost efficiently, right? You can't serve many, many, many users, but what it can do is it can go block,…”
Patel: Microsoft's custom Maia AI chip is not a credible competitor
“And then, you know, Microsoft's Maya is not credible, but like, you know, maybe it will be one day, right?”
Patel: Groq missed revenue significantly before being acquired
“In fact, they missed revenue last year significantly and yet they got bought, right? Because the value of the IP was there and the value of the team.”
Patel: All major non-Nvidia AI chips will fully support vLLM by mid-2026
“All of them will have a very good UX for download model, run model on VLM by The middle of the year, I think, right? Certainly AMD is already there by the end of this quarter.”
Dylan Patel: AMD will remain in single-digit percentage AI market share
“I don't think they'll Go beyond, like, I think they'll stay in single digits market share, single digit percentage market share.”
Patel: Chip startups cannot beat Nvidia playing Nvidia's game
“You're never going to beat Nvidia at their own game, right? They're going to have the supply chain on lock. They're going to get to the newest memory technology or process technology or whatever packaging technology, whatever it is, sooner than you.”
Patel: Chinese local governments, not national, banned Nvidia's H20 and H200
“But as far as I understand, the national government has not banned Nvidia's H-twenty or H-two hundred, but the local ones have. Right. A lot of local ones have said, no, you know, you must use China manufactured chips.”
Patel: 15 to 20 countries could single-handedly shut down semiconductor manufacturing
“I would say there's like 15 or 20 countries that can shut down the entire semiconductor industry.”
Patel: China currently has the world's most vertically integrated semiconductor stack
“China has the most vertical stack and semiconductors today.”
Patel: US cannot build a fully independent fab even for 20-year-old tech
“America could not build a fully vertical fab without stuff from elsewhere, even if it's 20 year old tech.”
Patel: China will narrow its lithography gap to five years shortly
“Their lithography is like 10 years behind and I think it'll be five years behind in a couple of years, right?”
Patel: U.S. CHIPS Act would not have passed without COVID car shortages
“Chips Act did not get passed, only got passed because that happened. And people are like, oh my God, the semiconductors are why cars can't be made. If that didn't happen, we wouldn't even have the Chips Act.”
Patel: Two percent of global GitHub commits are generated by Claude Code
“But two percent of GitHub commits today are cloud code.”
Patel: AI is underearning the economic value it creates by a significant margin
“AI is under earning the value that it's producing in the world, right? By a significant margin already today.”
Patel: Engineer built an RTS game using $10K of Claude API
“He used, like, 10,000 dollars of Claude in one week and built an entire RTS from scratch about, like, but instead of, like, being a standard RTS where it's like, oh, Age of Empires where you advance through ages or Starcraft, it is an RTS where it's China vers…”
Patel: Only a few holdouts left writing code manually at Anthropic
“We have an indicator internally at Anthropic where you see how many people actually write code now. There's only a few holdouts left.”
Patel: Data center power consumption will grow from 2% to 10% of US grid
“And then you've got data centers now all of a sudden coming online and going from two percent to 10% of the U S grid in just a handful of years.”
Patel: Data centers will use under 1% of US water by 2030
“So the U.S. Grid will get to, like, 10% of power by, like, 28, 27, is data centers. For water consumption, it's not even gonna crack one percent. By the end of the decade.”
Patel: xAI's Colossus uses as much water as 2.5 In-N-Outs
“I think the metric was the entirety of Elon Musk's Colossus data center, right? Uses as much water as two and a half in and outs.”
Patel: SemiAnalysis advised a client on buying and restarting a coal plant
“Have clients would like, had a client buy a coal plant. And we were advising them on the transaction based on, they just like showed up and they're like, yeah, we want to buy power assets.”
Patel: OpenAI's next model will outperform Opus 4.5 around February-March
“OpenAI's new model, I think, will be better than Opus 4.5, and it's coming, like, somewhat soon in March-ish timeframe, maybe February, March-ish, but”
Patel: OpenAI has a better RL stack than Anthropic, but inferior pre-training
“Because OpenAI has a better RL stack than Anthropic today, it's just their pre-trained models suck compared to Anthropic's pre-training, right?”
Patel: Google has better pre-training than OpenAI or Anthropic, but worse RL
“Flip side, Google has a better pre-trained model than Anthropic or OpenAI, but their RL stack sucks.”
Patel: Opus 4.5 on Claude Code permanently changes how people work
“Opus 4.5 on Claude code is a new moment where the way you work has forever changed.”
Patel: AI coding UX will enable voice interaction within six months
“Give it six months, the models will be good enough that the UX can be like, talking to it.”
Patel: AI workload scale enables 10x performance gains from specialized chips
“But now the workload is so large that there is room for specialization that will give you 10 X increases in certain domains, right?”
Patel: Most AI chips will be consumed via open-source engines, not direct programming
“I think most AI chips will not be consumed by people programming anything for it. They will download an open source inference engine, they will download an open source model, and then they will put it on the, and it's really simple to download VLM and, like, m…”
Patel: AI coding startup costs are driven by pre-fill context, not decode tokens
“If you look at coding as an application and you like look at these coding companies and how much they're paying for prefill versus decode, actually majority of their cost is prefill tokens, not decode tokens, because the context is just so large and it's switc…”
OpenAI surpassed ByteDance as the largest GPU renter globally
“And so when you look at who rents the most GPUs in the world, it's three companies, right? So one of them is obviously OpenAI. Second one, actually they were bigger than OpenAI. They are bigger than OpenAI today, or no, they were bigger than OpenAI than OpenAI…”
ByteDance is taking over 1 GW of Oracle data center capacity in Malaysia
“It's instead being built in Malaysia, and Oracle has over a gigawatt of capacity in Malaysia that ByteDance is gonna take, right?”
Patel: Nvidia is backstopping CoreWeave's land and power capital needs
“NVIDIA invested two billion in CoreWeave, but what's more important is that that's like sort of just like the sticker. What's really relevant is NVIDIA is going to work with CoreWeave to acquire and backstop and all these things, the land, the power, the energ…”
Patel: Huawei is the most vertically integrated company in the world
“Always the most vertical company in the world. No company is more verticalized than Huawei, which then leads to huge innovations.”
Patel: TSMC is actively manufacturing chips in Arizona for Nvidia, Apple, and AMD
“TSMC is literally making chips for NVIDIA and Apple and AMD and others in Arizona today, right?”
Patel: Microsoft Nebius NJ data center didn't drive power price hikes
“That data center has nothing to do with power prices going up. It's super storm standee, like five years ago, knocking or whatever, how many years ago, knocking down the state's electrical infrastructure and then the, then improving all these improvements. And…”
Patel: New Waymo vehicle costs dropped from $300k to $90k-$100k
“Their Waymo's went from like 300 K to like a hundred K or 90 K, the new Waymo car.”
Patel: Hyperscaler capex will reach roughly $500 billion this year
“Hyperscalers capex is going to be like five hundred billion dollars this year or something like this.”
Patel: Much of current AI infrastructure spending yields no immediate financial return
“That's what's happening today is that people are spending all this infra money on infra and there's no return for a lot of it, right? A lot of it is just doing research and like trying to get adoption and it's free users.”
Patel: The US has not built wholesale new power capacity in 50 years
“America's not built power for 50 years really, right? It's like converted from coal to gas and like things like this, but like really just have not built wholesale new power on a large scale.”