Agrawal: AI Semis Generate $200B, While AI Apps Are Only Earning $40B
Apoorv Agrawal · Understanding OpenAI’s $500B Valuation · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Aug 27, 2025 · at 39:43
Apoorv Agrawal, Partner at Altimeter Capital, outlines Altimeter's estimates of annualized revenue distribution across AI semiconductors, infrastructure, and application layers.
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“Nvidia earned, Nvidia alone at the chip player earned roughly forty billion dollars in data center revenue in Q one last quarter. So analyze that's about a 160. Let's say the total industry is 170, 180, maybe let's say 200. The infra layer is 20, thirty billion. This is inference revenue that's being earned by the hyperscalers and new clouds and so on. So a fraction of this, right? A fraction of the 200. And then the Revenue being earned by the application layer. This is players like open AI and tropic and perplexity and clean and so on is on the order of, you know, 30, forty billion dollars.”
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