BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum

**Molly O'Shea** (0:00)
Tony Kim, Tony Kim, Tony Kim, Tony Kim from BlackRock, who runs the Global Technology Team there.

**Tony Kim** (0:04)
AI happens. It's like BCE on a domine, and bam, 23 happens. Everything changed. So the base layer of compute went up 10,000x. $10,000 server is a million dollar server. There's roughly 10 plus trillion market cap in software services and internet. There's 22, 23 trillion in Mag 7, and there's another 30 plus trillion in chips and hardware. I don't think people would realize that we are that compute hardware centric. Before AI, BCE era, it was probably reversed. And so you've seen in the last four years a transformation in value that has systematically been happening for the last four years. The realization came to me that when we hit AD era, AI era, that you needed to rethink everything. The Chinese are coming, and there's 130, 140 robotics companies in China. I see 30, 40 potential IPOs this year alone this year, and there's, what, 12 in the United States, maybe this year.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:10)
Tony Kim, welcome to Sourcery.

**Tony Kim** (1:12)
Thank you. Pleasure to be here, in Paris.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:15)
In Paris, at the REI Summit. We're in a secret off location that has AC and some croissants, so it's quite nice. It's beautiful here.

**Tony Kim** (1:23)
It's so classic French. I love it. It's fantastic.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:27)
So, you're on stage a bit this year. What are you covering?

**Tony Kim** (1:31)
I am doing four panels in my involvement with REI. So, one on accelerators with D-Matrix, kind of the next-gen computer architectures. Another one with PsiQuantum and on quantum computing. A third with Lumentum and kind of bringing optics to kind of next-gen data center design.
And then finally with Broadcom and XPU and AI code design for chips.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:07)
So, light agenda?

**Tony Kim** (2:08)
Light agenda, yeah.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:10)
So, as the head of global tech for BlackRock, what brings you here? How did you get involved with REI's?

**Tony Kim** (2:17)
So, I got involved last year. One of my companies I was involved with, Samba Nova, Lippu was supposed to be one of the speakers and he couldn't make it. So, I decided to fill in for that.
And then I saw REI's, this thing in Paris at the Louvre. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. It was the second year of development that Henri had kind of pioneered and built this event. I saw something there. I saw a lot of my colleagues and friends from San Francisco all congregating here in Paris. And I thought, well, I'd like to help foster this, get it going. And so, last year I was here.
And then this year, it's, I don't know, probably tripled again in size. It seems to be Europe's biggest or most targeted AI conference. And so, yeah, so I continue to help and do what I can to help build an AI presence for, in Europe.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:26)
It's massive. I don't know how they get all the names that they get, but I remember last year seeing Eric Schmidt on stage and like, I had not heard of the conference before. No. And I was just amazed.

**Tony Kim** (3:37)
And I think they're outgrowing it after the next year. I might outgrow the Louvre even. So it's, it's really becoming something. And well, you're here, testament to where it's come.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:47)
Well, they're amazing. So I'm happy to get involved in any way that I can. Yeah. So between all of the panels that you're doing, you're doing four panels. What are the through lines and the macro themes?

**Tony Kim** (3:58)
Through lines, macro themes. Okay. Well, I think one, one of the big ideas obviously clearly is, and we see that in the stock market and we see it in the investment market is that the primacy of compute. And how the actually you're seeing it already, how much the stock market and the capitalization in Silicon Valley has changed. And we went from a, let's call it a, a software-centric world to a compute-centric world.
And you're seeing the emergence of companies. So that's number one, this move to compute. And to me, in my opinion, you know, the models and the compute are kind of like symbiotic and, and synonymous with each other. So the primacy of compute. Within that, secondly, is since now that is the dominant theme, it is the dominant, where the capex, where the money, where the capitalization is all gone, it then engenders a whole rethink of the data center. And so I think there is a redesign of the data center. And we're going through stages of the data center rebuild. And so we had, think of data centers pre-AI, kind of like the scramble to build data centers today, where there's a massive shortage of compute. But on the other hand, then we're hitting the laws of physics are driving yet another transformation of data center design going forward. And so that's the second. And the ramifications of this data center redesign kind of flow through every layer of the AI stack. Third, within that, then you go another layer deep in this data center redesign.