Latest / In the Loop AI / SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs: AI's Reckoning
Transcript
- 0:00Josh: Three of the largest IPOs in history are filing within weeks of each other.
- 0:03Josh: We have SpaceX, OpenAI, and as of just this week, Anthropic.
- 0:06Josh: And on that same day, Google raised $80 billion of outside capital to fund its own AI buildout.
- 0:12Josh: Now, the interesting part here is they're partly funded by each other's money.
- 0:15Josh: Everyone is contributing to the other person's balance sheets.
- 0:18Josh: And we've even gone so far as in the last few weeks to change the rules protecting
- 0:22Josh: passive investors about how they can invest in IPOs.
- 0:26Josh: The biggest buildout in the history of
- 0:29Josh: capitalism is currently happening and we have
- 0:32Josh: to ask the question is there enough money
- 0:35Josh: like clearly there's a reason there's correlation as to why each
- 0:38Josh: one of these companies are choosing to go public all around the same time and
- 0:41Josh: this chart that we're sharing on screen here is pretty incredible i mean between
- 0:44Josh: open ai anthropic and spacex the total amount raised during ipos is going to
- 0:49Josh: be 180 billion dollars that's more than the entire dot-com bubble combined at 164 billion dollars.
- 0:56Josh: That's three years versus three IPOs. So the scale of this is huge.
- 1:00Josh: And I mean, we have to answer a few questions. Is this a circular economy moment?
- 1:04Josh: Are they running out of money? Have they outgrown private capital?
- 1:07Josh: There's a lot to talk about here, Ejaz, I guess, starting with SpaceX.
- 1:11Ejaaz: Yeah, so you've got SpaceX open-air and Anthropik. They're having blockbuster IPOs
- 1:17Ejaaz: The story isn't really about like each of them individually.
- 1:20Ejaaz: It's the fact that they're all happening potentially within weeks of each other.
- 1:23Ejaaz: They're all targeting like by latest a Q4 IPO and the combined raise is absolutely
- 1:29Ejaaz: massive. We haven't seen anything like this before.
- 1:30Ejaaz: So if we break down like what we've seen so far, we had SpaceX,
- 1:35Ejaaz: I think it was April 1st that filed for
- 1:37Ejaaz: their S1, which basically is their proclamation that they intend to IPO.
- 1:42Ejaaz: I think they're targeting around an IPO sometime either this month or at least
- 1:45Ejaaz: early July. That's what the rumor is. are saying right now.
- 1:48Ejaaz: And then 10 days ago, we had OpenAI reportedly confidentially file their own S1 for their own IPO.
- 1:56Ejaaz: And then 10 days later, aka yesterday, Anthropic filed for their confidential
- 2:02Ejaaz: S1, which means that now all three of these companies are going for blockbuster
- 2:06Ejaaz: IPOs within potentially weeks of each other.
- 2:08Ejaaz: And so it begs the question, why is this happening now? Why such a rush?
- 2:13Ejaaz: The answer to me is pretty simple.
- 2:16Ejaaz: The AI CapEx build-out is becoming costlier than any of these companies could
- 2:20Ejaaz: have expected, and they've decided to lean in.
- 2:23Ejaaz: They've run out of free cash flow. Up until this point, all of these companies
- 2:27Ejaaz: have spent private money, money that they've raised from investors or earned
- 2:31Ejaaz: themselves through revenue.
- 2:33Ejaaz: And now they're turning to the public and saying, we need more money to build
- 2:37Ejaaz: out more data centers and GPUs so that we can train these models and facilitate
- 2:41Ejaaz: all the demand that we're seeing.
- 2:42Ejaaz: Now, if you talk to each of these companies, none of them say that there is no demand on their side.
- 2:48Ejaaz: Google and I believe Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have all reported profitable
- 2:54Ejaaz: quarters through all their AI CapEx expenditure.
- 2:56Ejaaz: I think combined, actually, those four companies were aiming to spend around
- 2:59Ejaaz: $1 trillion this year, but it's not enough.
- 3:01Ejaaz: And so they need more money to kind of like fund all of this thing.
- 3:05Ejaaz: The criticism that comes to me is like, I don't know whether this is the point
- 3:09Ejaaz: of no return. We were chatting about this before we started recording,
- 3:12Ejaaz: where there's no going back after this.
- 3:14Ejaaz: We are jumping into the abyss, and whether we're going to lever up through debt
- 3:18Ejaaz: instruments or whatever that might be, there is no returning from this. It is all in or nothing.
- 3:24Josh: Well, and the thing I found most interesting is it's not just the companies that are going all in.
- 3:27Josh: It's the institutions, and it's the public, and it is pretty much everyone who's going all in.
- 3:33Josh: So much so that the largest funds on Wall Street that actually host these IPOs
- 3:37Josh: are changing the rules just to accommodate them.
- 3:39Josh: This most recent one happened around the SpaceX IPO, where index providers,
- 3:44Josh: they waived their profitability requirements and cut the seasoning window from
- 3:48Josh: 90 days to five. Basically, what that means is...
- 3:50Josh: A company needed to prove that it was a viable company that could be traded
- 3:55Josh: publicly before index funds were required to buy it.
- 3:59Josh: Now, those index funds can buy it a lot sooner.
- 4:02Josh: So a lot of people who might not want to be investing in SpaceX,
- 4:06Josh: their retirement funds, their 401ks, the indexes that hold it are going to be
- 4:10Josh: able to invest a lot faster than they normally otherwise would have been.
- 4:13Ejaaz: Yeah, this has never happened before. So SpaceX is effectively changing the
- 4:17Ejaaz: rules of the IPO market in order to facilitate the massive raise that they're going for.
- 4:22Ejaaz: So a few sentences here that caught my eye. This forces over $30 trillion in
- 4:27Ejaaz: passive 401k, so retirement fund money, to buy SpaceX.
- 4:31Ejaaz: It's forcing them to buy it at IPO valuation. So it roughly means that around
- 4:35Ejaaz: 24% of SpaceX's IPO supply of shares is going to be absorbed through these passive funds.
- 4:42Ejaaz: We've never seen anything like that before. Secondly, typically,
- 4:45Ejaaz: if you want to get included in indexes, prestigious indexes,
- 4:48Ejaaz: such as the NASDAQ 100 or the Fortune 500, you need to, one,
- 4:52Ejaaz: demonstrate that you're earning a ton of revenue, and two,
- 4:56Ejaaz: demonstrate that for, I think it was like one or two successive quarters.
- 5:00Ejaaz: So we're talking about like three to six months.
- 5:01Ejaaz: All of those rules are being waived to days.
- 5:05Ejaaz: We're talking like five to 15 days for two separate different indexes that are
- 5:08Ejaaz: saying, okay, listen, if you can prove that the IPO price trades above a certain
- 5:12Ejaaz: price for this amount, we'll include you the index.
- 5:14Ejaaz: Don't worry, we'll forget about it. And we'll get all these pension funds to
- 5:18Ejaaz: purchase or buy your stock.
- 5:19Ejaaz: So Elon basically needs to keep the stock price up for above a certain level, and he's good to go.
- 5:25Josh: Well, it's a little concerning because like for decades, these big indexes,
- 5:29Josh: they've had two rules specifically designed to protect ordinary people who just
- 5:33Josh: have investment accounts, retirement accounts.
- 5:35Josh: And those two rules were like you mentioned, one of them was four straight quarters of profit.
- 5:39Josh: And then the other was a minimum float of five to 10%. And actually those were
- 5:43Josh: implemented because of the fallout from the dot-com crash.
- 5:47Josh: In 1999 to 2000, indexes took a bunch of the super high growth cash losing companies
- 5:53Josh: near the top. And that means that 401k holders or retirees, they were also holding
- 5:58Josh: those companies and kept holding the bag.
- 6:00Josh: So after they got crushed in the bubble burnout, what happened was is that they
- 6:04Josh: implemented these rules. Now it feels like we're having deja vu.
- 6:07Josh: The rules are getting reversed again. So now you don't actually need to have
- 6:11Josh: four straight quarters of gap profit.
- 6:12Josh: You just need to have, I believe it's 15 days.
- 6:16Josh: So it's like a pretty considerable decrease in the parameters required to allow
- 6:20Josh: these index funds to invest.
- 6:21Josh: And it's like history doesn't to repeat, but it certainly does rhyme.
- 6:24Josh: And it seems like the last time we did this, it wasn't good.
- 6:27Josh: Now we're kind of reverting back to those terms.
- 6:29Josh: That seems a little bit concerning to me, at least. So that's to be noted.
- 6:33Josh: I think it's probably good for the price, right? It's like there's so much buying
- 6:36Josh: pressure that's going to be pushing SpaceX up, but the downstream effects of it,
- 6:41Josh: not going as well as planned are going to hurt some people who might not want
- 6:45Josh: to be buying SpaceX shares in the first place?
- 6:48Ejaaz: You know, Josh, I think the main criticism of the SpaceX IPO,
- 6:51Ejaaz: and I think honestly, a lot of it is justifiable, is they just haven't proven
- 6:56Ejaaz: the revenue model just yet.
- 6:57Ejaaz: They're saying like, hey, we'll launch AI data centers in space.
- 7:00Ejaaz: We'll do it on our rockets. But they haven't like proven that model,
- 7:03Ejaaz: at least even like a proof of concept right now, like they're launching space rockets up there.
- 7:07Ejaaz: But like, we don't have GPUs in space that are currently training Frontier models.
- 7:10Ejaaz: So it's still kind of like, trust me, bro, in a sense.
- 7:13Ejaaz: Now, one company that has proven
- 7:16Ejaaz: a lot of revenue and has gone on the craziest story arc is Anthropic.
- 7:20Ejaaz: And yesterday, they filed for a draft S1 registration statement of the SEC,
- 7:26Ejaaz: which basically states that they plan to IPO in the coming months. Now,
- 7:31Ejaaz: The story is very different with Anthropic in a few different ways.
- 7:35Ejaaz: Josh, if you remember, at the end of last year, we did an episode, right?
- 7:38Ejaaz: And we mentioned something about the CFO, Krishna Rao, of Anthropic.
- 7:42Ejaaz: And he said, we have no immediate plans to IPO. We're taking our time.
- 7:48Ejaaz: Back then, they had achieved $9 billion of annual recurring revenue.
- 7:51Ejaaz: And they had estimated for the entirety of 2026 that they would hit something
- 7:56Ejaaz: along the lines of $20 billion of ARR. They hit that in the first month and a half of 2026.
- 8:03Ejaaz: And most recently, they just hit $45 billion of ARR.
- 8:08Ejaaz: That's because of the success of Claude Code, Claude Cowork,
- 8:11Ejaaz: and a host of other enterprise contracts, which they are signing.
- 8:14Ejaaz: They're doing a bunch of different JVs. They're raising money from Blackstone.
- 8:16Ejaaz: They're doing a ton of different things.
- 8:18Ejaaz: So in contrast to SpaceX, they are actually earning a lot of money.
- 8:22Ejaaz: So it makes sense that they now want to take this a step further.
- 8:25Ejaaz: They're acquiring as much compute as they can. and they're in a race with mainly
- 8:29Ejaaz: OpenAI to serve their frontier models, to train their frontier models and to
- 8:34Ejaaz: provide it to as many people as they can.
- 8:36Ejaaz: That's why I think they're going forward with this IPO. Now,
- 8:38Ejaaz: it's important to state that there was no details released, was there?
- 8:41Ejaaz: This is just kind of like a mandatory statement that they had to make.
- 8:44Ejaaz: OpenAI, I don't think, had to
- 8:45Ejaaz: do this, but Anthropic, in the efforts of transparency, decided to do it.
- 8:50Ejaaz: I have a few reasons why I think they might be doing it, but I don't know.
- 8:53Ejaaz: Do you have any thoughts? Yeah.
- 8:55Josh: It's funny. It's a confidential disclosure of a confidential filing.
- 8:59Josh: It's pretty ironic, but I think this took a lot of people by shock.
- 9:03Josh: Everyone was kind of surprised at the rate. I was looking at Polymarket and
- 9:06Josh: everyone expected OpenAI to IPO prior to Anthropoc.
- 9:09Josh: So to see this news shocked it and it kind of flipped the margins on their heads
- 9:13Josh: there in terms of the Polymarket.
- 9:14Josh: But what I'm seeing here with the information post, and this actually looks
- 9:18Josh: outdated because the rumors I've
- 9:19Josh: been seeing is that Anthropoc is actually growing even faster than this.
- 9:22Josh: And it's showing that Anthropoc just has this unbelievable growth trajectory
- 9:26Josh: that has been driven by real value add, mostly on the enterprise side in creating
- 9:31Josh: these like unbelievable models.
- 9:32Josh: I know, I mean, when you think about Mythos now, they announced it,
- 9:35Josh: what, two months ago, which means it finished training even before that.
- 9:39Josh: And like, they just have these unbelievably powerful models.
- 9:42Josh: I feel like they're feeling really confident going into this.
- 9:45Josh: And it gets into the conversation about how much money actually is there for the market to absorb.
- 9:49Josh: Is there actually a race to go out and collect capital
- 9:52Josh: because we know spacex is going first the rumor is maybe around june 12th that's
- 9:57Josh: coming in the next like two weeks so that's going to absorb god maybe a hundred
- 10:01Josh: billion dollars of capital it looks like they're trying to raise 75 but i'm
- 10:04Josh: sure it's going to exceed that how much money can anthropic then pull from that
- 10:07Josh: and then if open ai is after them how much money is going to be left for them
- 10:11Josh: and it feels like we're just,
- 10:12Josh: demanding a lot from public markets and like we started the private markets
- 10:16Josh: maybe they're tapped out, maybe they're not, but we're going to quickly learn how fast,
- 10:21Josh: public market reserves can get tapped out because this is a tremendous amount
- 10:24Josh: of capital everyone's raising.
- 10:25Ejaaz: I mean, the way I think about it, right, is you have a subset of investors that
- 10:30Ejaaz: are purchasing or will purchase the stocks of these different companies for
- 10:34Ejaaz: one particular thesis, right, which is like, I'm bullish on AI.
- 10:38Ejaaz: But then you have a whole retail subsection that are like, I just use Claude
- 10:41Ejaaz: every day, and it's super helpful to me.
- 10:43Ejaaz: So obviously, I'm going to buy that thing, right? I use ChatGPT every day, right?
- 10:46Ejaaz: So there's these two subsects, and they're all going to result in the same thing,
- 10:49Ejaaz: which is like, we're going to purchase stock of these companies.
- 10:53Ejaaz: Now, if you're on the company side, you're using it for one thing.
- 10:56Ejaaz: Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropik, has said it.
- 10:58Ejaaz: Sarah Fryer, CFO of OpenAI, has said it. And Elon has said it.
- 11:02Ejaaz: We just need more compute because more compute translates into better AIs,
- 11:05Ejaaz: which translates into better products, which means that we can serve more customers,
- 11:08Ejaaz: which means that we can earn more money.
- 11:09Ejaaz: Now, in Anthropik's case particularly, I think the rumors around their AGI-like
- 11:15Ejaaz: model called Mythos is very real.
- 11:17Ejaaz: We've got like breaking news from today that I have up on the screen that they're
- 11:20Ejaaz: rolling out their Project Glasswing, which is kind of like the bucketed sandboxed
- 11:25Ejaaz: version of release for Claude Mythos to 150 additional organizations across the entire world.
- 11:31Ejaaz: And they even said on a previous statement recently that they're going to be
- 11:34Ejaaz: releasing it publicly to people over the next couple of weeks.
- 11:37Ejaaz: So I think this all comes at a very coincidental, intentionally coincidental time.
- 11:42Ejaaz: And the other thing that's different with Anthropik is they're estimated to
- 11:45Ejaaz: be profitable by the end of this month to the tune of $550 million, which, listen,
- 11:51Ejaaz: is a drop in the ocean compared to like the trillions of dollars that are being
- 11:54Ejaaz: spent on CapEx, but they'll be the first major AI lab to do so.
- 11:58Ejaaz: And so it's just this massive run rate. I think of all these IPOs,
- 12:01Ejaaz: I'm probably most bullish on the anthropic thing, but they're all different
- 12:05Ejaaz: to their own kind of lane.
- 12:07Josh: Now, when we were looking at our bubble meter in a few episodes ago,
- 12:11Josh: and we were kind of figuring out at what point do things get scary?
- 12:14Josh: It was largely around the idea that these large mega companies like Google will
- 12:20Josh: start to spend more than their revenues allow them to.
- 12:22Josh: Basically, they'll start going into debt to fund these build outs.
- 12:24Josh: And we have some indication that we're kind of slowly turning into that territory
- 12:29Josh: where Google has ran out of revenue on their balance sheet and are now looking
- 12:34Josh: to raise external capital.
- 12:35Josh: This is not IPO related as you know Google has been
- 12:38Josh: public for a very long time but they need more money so
- 12:41Josh: what did they do they went out and raised 80 billion dollars to fund the AI
- 12:47Josh: build out that is a tremendous amount of capital I can't remember the total
- 12:50Josh: capex spend that they guaranteed but I imagine it's close to like 30 40 percent
- 12:54Josh: of the total that they were planning to spend annually and they just went and raised it noteworthy,
- 12:59Josh: Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's old company, wrote a $10 billion check
- 13:03Josh: to get in. And it's a pretty huge deal.
- 13:06Josh: It's $30 billion in underwritten public offerings, $40 billion through an at-the-market
- 13:11Josh: stock program starting in the third quarter of this year, and then $10 billion
- 13:14Josh: through private placement to Berkshire, which we just talked about. So it's a huge deal.
- 13:18Josh: And he's just I'm curious your take on this, actually, because we did a deep
- 13:23Josh: dive into Google's balance sheet.
- 13:24Josh: We saw how much money they made. We saw how much they were spending. They were in the green.
- 13:28Josh: Now it looks like they're intending to. Are they going to go in the red or are
- 13:31Josh: they just offsetting? Are they softening the blow so that they still have a
- 13:34Josh: lot of cushion just in case?
- 13:36Ejaaz: Yeah, I think they're leaning all in and they'll eventually have books in the red.
- 13:41Ejaaz: Larry and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, said very explicitly,
- 13:48Ejaaz: I think it was a year and a half ago, that they are willing to lose it all versus
- 13:52Ejaaz: like lose the actual AI race.
- 13:54Ejaaz: So they're going to spend, spend, spend until they create enough compute.
- 13:57Ejaaz: It's founder mode. They've gone back to founder mode.
- 13:59Ejaaz: Sergey Brin came back to Google to do exactly this, to kind of lock in.
- 14:03Ejaaz: This is my favorite IPO story of the week. And it's not even an IPO,
- 14:08Ejaaz: right? So you have Google, public company, raising $80 billion.
- 14:11Ejaaz: Now, the question becomes, what are they using that $80 billion for?
- 14:14Ejaaz: Now, the headline is, we're using this $80 billion to build out more AI CapEx.
- 14:18Ejaaz: We're going to build more TPUs. We're
- 14:22Ejaaz: A story that a lot of people missed is, I think it's like 30 billion of this
- 14:27Ejaaz: 80 billion is being used to pay off tax obligations for their employees who
- 14:32Ejaaz: are cashing out stock over the next couple of months.
- 14:34Ejaaz: All right. So like, I just want to be clear here, like, a large chunk of this
- 14:39Ejaaz: raise isn't actually going to be used for the AI cap expand.
- 14:42Ejaaz: Now, putting that aside, Google isn't a bad actor, in my opinion.
- 14:48Ejaaz: They've been pretty transparent as they can be with how much they're spending
- 14:51Ejaaz: on all this AI stuff and what they intend to do with all of this.
- 14:54Ejaaz: And they're giving it their best shot.
- 14:55Ejaaz: Now, what this gives me reminiscence of is, Josh, do you remember at the end
- 14:59Ejaaz: of last year, we were kind of saying how OpenAI is kind of distracted.
- 15:03Ejaaz: They're kind of focusing on like random AI products and they're like missing
- 15:08Ejaaz: the whole coding AI thing and all that kind of stuff.
- 15:11Ejaaz: And then they decided to call a code red and lock in. I feel like Google has
- 15:16Ejaaz: drifted into that kind of like broad spectrum of things.
- 15:19Ejaaz: They're not really focused. They're like building out an agent,
- 15:22Ejaaz: but then they're trying to build out a better coding model.
- 15:24Ejaaz: They're trying to build out a better generalized LLM, but then they're building
- 15:27Ejaaz: out the infrastructure TPUs, but then they're selling those TPUs to competitors,
- 15:30Ejaaz: which means that they don't have enough compute to train their own Gemini models,
- 15:33Ejaaz: which means that Gemini falls behind, and it has fallen behind.
- 15:35Ejaaz: Their recent Gemini 3.5 flash is behind Frontier models despite all this money
- 15:39Ejaaz: that they had, and now they need to raise all this money to train a better model.
- 15:43Ejaaz: It just seems like they just need to lock in and focus.
- 15:46Ejaaz: Now, when I look at this structure, $80 billion, that's a lot of money.
- 15:50Ejaaz: It's effectively their own IPO to be able to fund their own build out.
- 15:54Ejaaz: I'm not convinced that spending $30 billion of that to write off tax obligations
- 15:58Ejaaz: is the best way to do it. It kind of wreaks a little bit of desperation.
- 16:01Ejaaz: But I am optimistic because the last four times that we've had this kind of
- 16:07Ejaaz: public raise from a major company, Berkshire Hathaway has put in a $10 billion check.
- 16:12Ejaaz: And all of those companies have done pretty well. So I'm hoping the same thing
- 16:15Ejaaz: is going to happen with Google. But it's just an interesting story.
- 16:18Josh: Yeah. I mean, in Berkshire, we trust, right? Like they have been right in the
- 16:21Josh: past. They are very disciplined.
- 16:22Josh: We're going to hope they continue. It's also nowhere that Google owns a large
- 16:26Josh: percentage of a lot of these companies going public.
- 16:29Josh: I mean, Google is one of the largest private stakeholders in SpaceX and also Anthropic.
- 16:34Josh: So they stand to benefit from the upside of this in a pretty considerable way.
- 16:38Josh: It's also a little bit scary how large these numbers are getting.
- 16:41Josh: It feels like we're getting numb to the hundreds of billions of dollars number.
- 16:46Josh: I mean, Google at $180 to $190 billion in CapEx this year is unbelievable to
- 16:52Josh: imagine just a few years ago.
- 16:53Josh: So for them to go all in, it's all in at a scale that we have never seen before.
- 16:57Josh: And I think that's one of the themes of this episode is we're really experiencing,
- 17:01Josh: like this is a very special time in history because never in the history of
- 17:04Josh: this country and capitalism has this amount of money and value been concentrated
- 17:10Josh: on pursuing a single idea.
- 17:12Josh: And the outcomes of that are going to be pretty big.
- 17:16Josh: I mean, bubble or not, we're building real value, real intelligence being built.
- 17:19Josh: And I think like the actual underlying civilizational shift is going to start
- 17:24Josh: to be felt as the outcome of all the spending starts to make its way into the market.
- 17:29Josh: And I think it's like it's easy to get lost in the numbers that are huge and large.
- 17:33Josh: It actually is going to result in real valuable tools. And we make fun of Google.
- 17:37Josh: They haven't come out with a new frontier model in a while.
- 17:39Josh: But I mean, I'm just using their tools and services now. And they're noticeably
- 17:43Josh: getting smarter and smarter and smarter.
- 17:44Josh: One thing I'm excited about is WWDC next week. We're going to be covering that.
- 17:47Josh: We'll see how Apple plans to actually roll out these tools and make them smarter
- 17:50Josh: and smarter. So we'll see where all the CapEx has been going.
- 17:52Josh: But there is one more IPO that's coming that we haven't mentioned, which is OpenAI.
- 17:58Ejaaz: Yeah, exactly. So we mentioned it earlier, but 10 days before Anthropic Fall
- 18:02Ejaaz: for that, potential IPO. OpenAI did the very same thing.
- 18:06Ejaaz: Confidentially confidential filing, by the way. And so it was reported...
- 18:10Ejaaz: They get this one confidential.
- 18:10Josh: Even though it leaks. It's like, if it's all going to leak, you might as well
- 18:13Josh: just publish it yourself.
- 18:15Ejaaz: Yeah. What was curious is the polymarket market on this particular IPO spiked
- 18:20Ejaaz: up before the Bloomberg and Financial Times report.
- 18:22Ejaaz: So there was definitely some insider stuff going on. But basically,
- 18:25Ejaaz: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have reportedly been behind the scenes helping
- 18:29Ejaaz: OpenAI and prepare for their IPO.
- 18:31Ejaaz: If you're wondering why they're doing it, it's for all the same reasons.
- 18:33Ejaaz: They wanna raise more money to build out a bunch of different data centers.
- 18:37Ejaaz: I think they broke ground on a new data center literally a few days ago, so it's all in.
- 18:42Ejaaz: A comment that I have is, and maybe this is like a potentially hot take, Josh, is,
- 18:48Ejaaz: I think all of this money that is being raised and is about to be spent is ultimately
- 18:53Ejaaz: going to result in a good thing.
- 18:56Ejaaz: I think that it's ultimately not going to be bubbly in its nature,
- 19:00Ejaaz: and it's going to result in the necessary infrastructure that is going to be
- 19:03Ejaaz: onshore in the West or in the U.S.
- 19:05Ejaaz: Specifically to create that next bedrock of foundation for technological innovation. You need compute.
- 19:12Ejaaz: You need the electrical lines. You need all the substrates to make these GPUs
- 19:16Ejaaz: and silicon chips actually work to serve it to customers. You need all of this.
- 19:20Ejaaz: And we are currently constrained by physical atoms.
- 19:24Ejaaz: If that sounds like a vague statement, it is not. I literally mean that.
- 19:27Ejaaz: I sit on the Gavin Baker's camp of opinion here, which is no matter how much
- 19:31Ejaaz: money you want to lever up and spend,
- 19:33Ejaaz: you can't actually spend the money because you are limited by how slow it is
- 19:38Ejaaz: to overcome regulations and build the actual, you know, brick and mortar of
- 19:43Ejaaz: the data centers and then create the silicon chips. There's only one ASML.
- 19:47Ejaaz: There's only one NVIDIA. There's only one TSMC. And it's hard to scale the physical
- 19:51Ejaaz: infrastructure side of AI.
- 19:53Ejaaz: So even if you want to lever up and create all these like weird debt structurings,
- 19:57Ejaaz: it does not matter because there is nowhere to spend it on. You're limited by physical atoms.
- 20:02Ejaaz: And until I see that block get unblocked we're not in a bubble
- 20:06Josh: This is my take yeah i mean to talk about gavin
- 20:08Josh: baker's point again he always mentions the idea of dark fiber comparing it to
- 20:11Josh: the internet bubble era where there was a tremendous amount of fiber optics
- 20:15Josh: laid for the internet but there simply wasn't enough use cases for the internet
- 20:19Josh: to go through the fibers there was a lot of dark fiber a lot of the build-out
- 20:23Josh: didn't get used it didn't generate revenue everything fell apart in this case,
- 20:27Josh: I mean, we talk about this all the time, but the GPUs from four or five years
- 20:29Josh: ago are being rented for more money than they were four or five years ago.
- 20:33Josh: Yeah, they're worth more.
- 20:34Josh: They're worth more. And it's funny, like Michael Burry, the big short guy,
- 20:37Josh: he was like, no, no, no, that's wrong. Everything's going to crash.
- 20:40Josh: He could not have been more incorrect.
- 20:41Josh: So, so far, all of the guidance, all the signals that we're seeing are green.
- 20:46Josh: They're all positive. Everything looks good. It seems like CapEx is actually returning real value.
- 20:51Josh: I mean, there was those rumors about Anthropic maybe turning up profits sometime
- 20:55Josh: soon, as you mentioned earlier.
- 20:55Josh: That's a really huge deal because if they could actually
- 20:58Josh: absorb all of this um fundraising money
- 21:02Josh: and then spend it in a way that's capital effective enough where
- 21:05Josh: they can return revenue that's like huge and open ai i
- 21:07Josh: don't believe they were planning on doing that for at least till the end of
- 21:10Josh: this year so all these signs are green the one thing i'm looking out for personally
- 21:15Josh: is companies who are cutting back on spending i know there's some news in the
- 21:19Josh: headlines about a half a trillion dollar bill that came up for amazon that was
- 21:23Josh: unintentional i don't know how true these things are but.
- 21:26Ejaaz: I think so you know
- 21:27Josh: Yeah so so long as companies are still extracting value from these ai systems
- 21:32Josh: then they'll continue to spend because it will just increase the revenue and
- 21:37Josh: increase the margins in their own business and so far so good fingers crossed it used to go that way did.
- 21:43Ejaaz: You see the uh the crazy stat that christian rao
- 21:46Ejaaz: dropped on i think it was like the invest like the best podcast
- 21:49Ejaaz: um anthropic for the fortune 10 so like 9 out of 10 of the fortune 10 so the
- 21:55Ejaaz: top 10 companies in the world basically use anthropic thought code specifically
- 21:59Ejaaz: and their net dollar retention rate which is basically like the budget that
- 22:04Ejaaz: they started with january 1st versus how much they estimate to spend by the end of the year
- 22:09Ejaaz: is increased by 500%. So they're planning to spend 5x more.
- 22:13Ejaaz: But the reason why they're doing that is not because they have to,
- 22:16Ejaaz: it's because they want to, because they're getting so much ROI on the back end.
- 22:20Ejaaz: So the point is, if this continues to trend in the right way,
- 22:25Ejaaz: the definition of a bubble is it's over-levered, and there's not enough demand on the buy side.
- 22:30Ejaaz: We're seeing the opposite happen, and we actually can't supply enough of the
- 22:33Ejaaz: silicon and compute to serve the buy side. That's why Google's raising $80 billion.
- 22:37Ejaaz: That's why all these companies are IPO-ing at massive valuations.
- 22:40Ejaaz: It's so that they can serve that.
- 22:41Ejaaz: And maybe I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid, but that's my take.
- 22:44Josh: Well, and also think about the downstream effects of that. They're huge.
- 22:46Josh: Now we have all this infrastructure that we're building out in the United States.
- 22:49Josh: We have the ability to build it out.
- 22:51Josh: And soon that's going to transition away from software as well.
- 22:54Josh: Like software will continue to be important, but I just saw a post from OpenAI
- 22:57Josh: recently. They're hiring for a robotics division. They're going to start building robots.
- 23:01Josh: SpaceX is building their Optimus robot. We're going to get a reveal probably
- 23:04Josh: around the time of the IPO, I would assume to gather a little more attention.
- 23:09Josh: And I think what we're seeing here is this like really huge shift of industrializing
- 23:13Josh: the United States in a big way.
- 23:15Josh: Like we're going to get satellites into space. We're going to send data centers into orbit.
- 23:19Josh: This takes a huge amount of capital, but think about the value it delivers.
- 23:22Josh: Think about the value of cloning the internet, but putting it into low earth orbit.
- 23:26Josh: So that way it's, it's nation state proof. It can never go offline. You never have outages.
- 23:30Josh: It's just this unbelievable technology that we're building funded by
- 23:34Josh: this capex build out this huge spending and now the public has the opportunity
- 23:38Josh: to actually get involved so is it going to be good or bad for the public we
- 23:41Josh: will see i'm feeling pretty bullish i think this is where i want to end the
- 23:44Josh: show actually ejaz is asking you which of these three if any are you most excited
- 23:49Josh: about and most likely to invest in at the ipo.
- 23:53Ejaaz: Oh, damn, I'm excited about all of them, dude. Okay, if I had to rank them,
- 23:58Ejaaz: it's Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI, but like it's within like a hair's distance
- 24:03Ejaaz: between each other. It's so tough.
- 24:05Ejaaz: They're all building amazing things. And I do truly believe that these three
- 24:09Ejaaz: companies will create products and services that will become the bedrock of
- 24:14Ejaaz: everything and anything that we build future businesses on.
- 24:17Ejaaz: And so the question is, how much would you value that kind of a company, right?
- 24:20Ejaaz: We've never seen anything like this before, right? We've never seen a type of
- 24:23Ejaaz: technological disruption which permeates every single industry that you could
- 24:28Ejaaz: possibly think of, including the hardware side of things, right?
- 24:31Ejaaz: What do you think happens when robotics scales up?
- 24:33Ejaaz: You're going to need a robotics model. You're going to need data to do that.
- 24:36Ejaaz: That's what these AR labs are going to do.
- 24:38Ejaaz: And you're going to need infinite compute, potentially in space.
- 24:42Ejaaz: You're going to need really smart models, potentially trained on RL from Anthropic
- 24:46Ejaaz: or from OpenAI that is able to do this.
- 24:49Ejaaz: And these three companies are the clear bet. So if I take a long-term perspective,
- 24:52Ejaaz: which is typically how I invest, I'm going to buy an IPO and we'll see what happens, you know?
- 24:58Josh: Yeah, I'm pretty stoked for all of them. I think for me, SpaceX is most interesting.
- 25:02Josh: I've been a fan of them for as long as I can remember.
- 25:05Josh: They are just such a badass company. How long have you been tracking SpaceX.
- 25:08Ejaaz: Josh? You've got to flex that. Come on.
- 25:10Josh: Well over a decade, probably close to 15 years.
- 25:12Ejaaz: That's it.
- 25:13Josh: Like it was as the beginning of the Falcon 9 program started because I remember
- 25:18Josh: watching all the live streams. And in fact, my YouTube channel is like,
- 25:21Josh: I think, 14, 15 years old or something.
- 25:23Josh: The first video I ever posted was like a handheld camera of my screen of the Falcon 9 launch.
- 25:29Josh: It was like, it's pretty amazing because it's been so cool to watch them go
- 25:32Josh: from the Falcon 1, which is a single rocket thruster to 9 to now Starship,
- 25:37Josh: which has like between the booster and the first second stage, like.
- 25:40Josh: 30, 940 engines. It's like unbelievable how much progress they've made.
- 25:45Josh: And it's so exciting because it opens up this awe-inspiring opportunity and
- 25:49Josh: having the opportunity to invest in that company to participate is really exciting to me.
- 25:53Josh: I know people are upset that it's trading so high on a relative basis,
- 25:57Josh: but when you consider what the future looks like in the case they succeed,
- 26:00Josh: and when you consider what the team requirements need to look like,
- 26:04Josh: there's really no better chance.
- 26:07Josh: You can't assemble a better team.
- 26:08Josh: You can't assemble a better company than this to take a shot on goal.
- 26:12Josh: So it's at least worth getting excited about and supporting that shot on goal,
- 26:16Josh: that like civilization is going to do something we've never done before in a
- 26:19Josh: really cool and exciting way that stands to benefit everyone else.
- 26:21Josh: And that's why I'm excited about SpaceX.
- 26:22Josh: I will try to participate. Hopefully it doesn't launch at like a $4 trillion valuation.
- 26:27Josh: Hopefully it stays kind of close to the share price it launches at.
- 26:30Josh: I think that's another thing we'll have to look out for is like how high the
- 26:33Josh: premiums actually are once they start trading, because we know there's going to be a ton of hype.
- 26:36Josh: But yeah, I think that's just about everything for this episode. Any final thoughts?
- 26:40Ejaaz: Nope, that's pretty much it. I just want to remind the audience that's listening
- 26:44Ejaaz: to this that Josh and I are delusionally optimistic about a lot of these different things.
- 26:49Ejaaz: We do try to ground ourselves occasionally, but overall, we take an optimistic
- 26:52Ejaaz: approach to AI and the frontier of tech.
- 26:54Ejaaz: So none of this is investment advice. But if you did enjoy this episode,
- 26:58Ejaaz: or if there's anything that you actually disagree with, please let us know in
- 27:01Ejaaz: the comments. You guys are very vocal.
- 27:03Ejaaz: Wherever you listen to us, if it's on YouTube, if it's on Spotify,
- 27:05Ejaaz: if it's on Apple Music or wherever, please subscribe, give us a rating,
- 27:08Ejaaz: leave us a review, leave us a comment.
- 27:10Ejaaz: We want to hear from you guys about what you guys think. Are you enjoying these kinds of episodes?
- 27:14Ejaaz: Are there other topics that we could cover that you might be more interested in hearing more about?
- 27:18Ejaaz: Let us know. But Josh, do you have any parting thoughts?
- 27:21Josh: That's it. Share this with a friend if you enjoyed. Let them know what they
- 27:24Josh: got to know about these IPOs that are incoming.
- 27:27Josh: Let us know which ones you're going to be participating in. And as always,
- 27:30Josh: we will see you guys in the next episode. Thank you guys so much for watching.
- 27:32Ejaaz: See you guys.