quote: "Energy Capacity = Economic Capacity" Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on why America's power grid is the ceiling on growth: "We went through 10 to 15 years where essentially I was taking coal offline at the rate I was adding renewables, and essentially the nation was flatlined in terms of overall energy capacity." "So essentially our economic capacity as a nation, flat for fifteen years." "Even with that, we've gone to maybe increasing our national energy capacity 4% per year. Going from essentially zero to one." "Nuclear as base load is a fabulous thing that we want to go build more of. Unfortunately all of our renewables have deep dependencies in China." "Energy capacity somewhat dampens how euphoric we can get on AI. Why build a new data center and buy the million GPUs if I can't power them?" @PGelsinger @RaghuRaghuram @appenz | Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger with a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller on the next wave of semiconductor innovation and the physical constraints shaping the AI buildout: Drawing on his experience designing Intel's 386 and 486 processors, Pat explains how AI could transform chip design, but also why faster design alone won't solve the industry's biggest problems. They examine the bottlenecks in manufacturing, memory bandwidth, advanced packaging, and power, and why today's explosion of specialized AI chips may eventually consolidate around a smaller number of architectures. They also discuss the potential for new memory technologies, the shift from copper to optical networking, and why energy capacity could become a major constraint on AI growth. Finally, they revisit Pat's VMware years to ask what virtualization might look like when infrastructure is built for agents rather than humans. YouTube: https://t.co/ZJFvOky68H 1:05 Hired by Intel at 18 3:50 Arguing with Stanford professors 7:25 Will AI design the next gen chips? 8:45 Designing faster than fabs can build 11:55 Why GPUs are stuck with bad memory 13:40 Why 100 AI chips will collapse to a few 19:15 Agents make new chips cheap to run 22:10 No new memory chip since the 90s 27:20 Why 16-layer chip stacks are a fantasy 32:15 The physics that keeps memory next to compute 34:55 "I declared the death of copper" 38:05 AI traffic breaks the internet's design 42:40 "Energy capacity equals economic capacity" 46:25 The 130-year-old power war AI reopened 48:50 VMware for agents @PGelsinger @RaghuRaghuram @appenz(Historical earnings: For 2026Q3 (period ended 2026-04-03), Seagate Technology reported basic EPS of 8.71, diluted EPS of 8.29, and net income of USD 1.890 billion. In the prior-year period 2025Q3 (period ended 2025-03-28), basic EPS was 4.65, diluted EPS was 4.52, and net income was USD 0.981 billion. For 2026Q2 (period ended 2026-01-02), basic EPS was 5.31, diluted EPS was 5.03, and net income was USD 1.142 billion. In the prior-year period 2024Q2 (period ended 2024-12-27), basic EPS was 3.04, diluted EPS was 2.95, and net income was USD 0.641 billion. Consensus expectations: For 2027Q1 (event date 2026-10-28), consensus EPS estimate is 7.4374 and revenue estimate is USD 4.159 billion. For 2027Q2 (event date 2027-01-25), consensus EPS estimate is 8.5079 and revenue estimate is USD 4.523 billion.)