Data center infrastructure companies are minting billionaires while consumer AI startups struggle. The speaker breaks down why every layer of the build-out stack—energy, transformers, chips, land, state relations—offers massive returns, pointing to Tennessee's data center boom as proof.
Chapters
At our partner meeting last week, I was telling the team, look, if I look at our portfolio companies that get into the data center stack, whether it's energy, transformers, installation of chips, finding land, dealing with state government, every one of those companies is creating billionaires out of its founders. If I look at our vertical use case AI companies, it's a mixed bag. You know, a lot of them are doing well too, but, you know, slower growth, trying to get a consumer base for a video generation app or apartment search with AI or whatever. The returns on the two sides of that coin are stark, you know, starkly different. They're all good. I'm not saying any of it's not doing well. It's all doing really, really well. But the people who cross that chasm and get into this data center buildout are crushing it. And there's opportunity at every level of it, from someone who's connected politically and can get the land, somebody who can find transformers overseas and import them, somebody who can do just architectural design, like deep core design to try and squeeze more value out of the existing chips or even legacy chips. All of those things are huge range of skills, but all those entrepreneurs are killing it. And it drives me nuts the AMA when people are like, how can I help? How can I participate? And they don't look inside, like go to Tennessee and look inside the colossus and find the opportunity and work out from there. Massive opportunity.
