AI Investor Panel: How Will We Fund the Global AI Revolution? | EP 219

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

How will we fund the global AI revolution?

Anjney Midha (0:03)

All the rules are being rewritten about how you fund growth, because we just need all the capital we can get. What is the main thing?

SPEAKER_3 (0:10)

It is AI.

Bonnie Chan (0:12)

Where does the next Nvidia style growth come from?

Anjney Midha (0:15)

The compute has gotten so expensive.

SPEAKER_3 (0:18)

They're gonna dedicate massive amounts of capital to this space.

Bonnie Chan (0:24)

I'm the old fashioned stock exchange. I think our common challenge will be to make sure that we find as many ways as possible that we match the capital with the opportunities.

Dave Blundin (0:36)

The amount of capital going into the sector way outstrips the venture funds. That trend is now drawing in a huge amount of money, which is why we're talking about it on this stage in Saudi Arabia. The untapped but mobile capital is here in this room. And if it jumps on the opportunity, it's like an opportunity I've never seen before. Now that's a Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:07)

All right, welcome everybody to our AI mini-summit, brought to you by Link Exponential Ventures. It's a pleasure to have you. We're gonna be having a series of 30-minute conversations that look at AI investing, where the next trillion-dollar companies are coming from. We'll be having a session of our Moonshots summit. And I'd like to open with our first session, which is, How Will We Fund the Global AI Revolution? To enable this conversation, it's a pleasure to bring on stage three leaders in this field. David Blundin. David is my business partner. He's a serial entrepreneur. He is the managing partner of Link Exponential Ventures, with 23 startups under his belt. A long track record of a 44% IRR, a little over a billion dollars AUM. Based on the campus of MIT and Harvard. David Blundin, please come on up. Take a seat here. Thank you, David. Next up is Bonnie Chan, CEO of the Hong Kong Exchange, and clearing HKEX since March of 2024, bringing over 30 years of global capital markets, legal and listening transformation experiences. Bonnie, please join us.

Finally, on our panel this morning is Anjney Midha, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, A16Z investing in frontier AI, open source infrastructure. The man who's backed Anthropic on the board of Mistral. Please welcome to the stage, Anjney Midha.

So, how will we fund the global AI revolution, guys? So, I mean, when I think about it, we are seeing today, at least in the United States, a billion dollars deployed per day into AI. The expectations are we're going to see that growing to three billion dollars a day by 2030, and I expect it's going to blow through that. In fact, I'm seeing capital flowing to the exclusion of a lot of other things. Let's open with opening thoughts around that. Anjney, I mean, you're at one of the largest venture funds on the planet. What percentage of A16Z is flowing towards AI? And what are your thoughts about the capital availability to fund this infrastructure of what we call on the Moonshots podcast, tiling the earth and compute?

Anjney Midha (4:03)

Right. How much capital is flowing into AI? Basically, all of it, and it's still not enough. Because the firm was founded to be a verticalized firm. We have an infrastructure fund, an applications fund, a healthcare fund, and all of those are now AI funds, right? Because AI is a cross-stack thing, whether you're working with teams that were training foundation models or building applications. I don't think anybody is not an AI investor anymore. On the other hand, what's also insatiable is the need for these, for AI businesses, especially ones that generate tokens, that leverage the latest generation in reasoning models, which generate 10 times more tokens than traditional gen-AI models before reasoning.

We're living through like Jevons Paradox every day where, no matter how much infrastructure build out we do, no matter how many algorithmic efficiencies there are, we somehow just need more compute, more infrastructure to serve the state-of-the-art demand in text, code, image, video. It's just sort of this insatiable explosion of use cases. And I just don't think we figured out how to change the traditional venture capital stack to fund all this growth. And that's why you're seeing, you know, we try to fund entrepreneurs as much as we can, but then we got to pull in all the friends we can, whether that's NVIDIA as a strategic who invests on the cap tables directly alongside us. It might be a data center provider. There's just, you know, whether it's Satya doing a billion-dollar investment into OpenAI as a nonprofit four years ago, or it's Amazon and Google investing in Anthropic. There's just all the rules are being rewritten about how you fund growth because we just need all the capital we can get.