Chips, Memory, and Power | Pat Gelsinger

Pat Gelsinger (0:00)

In a AI digital age, energy capacity equals economic capacity. Why build a new data center and buy a million GPUs if I can't power them? You're going to see more and more defaults happening on many of those data center projects, because the energy won't be there.

Guido Appenzeller (0:17)

Whenever you have the technology to make something easy, that means the bottleneck moves somewhere else.

Pat Gelsinger (0:22)

Nothing's a chip anymore, it's a rack. It took me three months to design it, but it's nine months until I can actually start to use it. Exactly how many major new memories have you had over the last 30 years?

Guido Appenzeller (0:32)

Zero.

Pat Gelsinger (0:33)

Memory innovation for the first time in 30 years is nigh upon us. I declared the death of copper about 25 years ago. Eventually, I'll be right for all of us hardware guys. This is like renaissance in front of you. AI inference accelerator chips, and I'm sure I don't even know them all. Why are you guys funding so many of those anyways?

Raghu Raghuram (0:50)

You've wanted your file shared too.

Guido Appenzeller (0:53)

Historically, there have not been 100 competing processor vendors in any industry ever. Is this a temporary thing? It will convert back to a view.

Pat Gelsinger (1:01)

I see it as...

SPEAKER_4 (1:02)

AI is making it faster to design chips, but actually building them, powering them and connecting them may be getting harder. In this episode, A16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller sit down with Pat Gelsinger, General Partner at Playground Global and former CEO of Intel and VMware, to discuss the next bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. Pat takes us back to his early days designing Intel's processors, when engineers were inventing the tools they needed to build the chips themselves. He explains why AI could bring a similar shift today, even as manufacturing timelines, memory bandwidth and power become harder constraints. They also debate whether the explosion of specialized AI chips will last, why Pat believes memory innovation is finally approaching a breakthrough and how optical networking could change the architecture of AI clusters.

In drawing on their shared history at VMware, they close with a question. What would it look like to rebuild virtualization for a world where AI agents, rather than humans, are the primary users?

Raghu Raghuram (2:08)

I'm here with our esteemed guest and dear friend and former boss, Mr. Pat Gelsinger.

Welcome, Pat. Pat is currently the General Partner at Playground Global, but as you are very, very well known in the industry for leading Intel, for being the CTO of Intel, of course leading VMware and many other things. So welcome.

Pat Gelsinger (2:31)

Hey, thank you, Raghu. Great to be with you and Guido.

And to me, this feels just a little bit like old home, right? We superimposed a year of change, right? But you both look the same. I feel energetic, so let's dive in.

Raghu Raghuram (2:44)

There has never been a day when you stop being energetic, so there's no use there. But yeah, no, let's start actually from your Intel career. Recently Andreessen Horowitz created this Horowitz and recent Academy, which was to find talented people between 16 and 22 and then put them into a modern educational setting so they'd be well prepared for either doing things on their own or joining the companies of today.

You had a similar experience, like you went to a regular trade school and then jumped into Intel when you were what, 18 or 19?

Pat Gelsinger (3:20)

Yeah, it was really a sort of magical period. I'm 16 years old. I accidentally went to scholarship. I go to tech school. I skipped my last year and a half of high school and Intel comes recruiting when I'm 18 years old. And I'd never been on an airplane. I had already fallen in love with computers at tech school. And the interviewer, right, Ron Smith was his name. He writes on his page. And I was number 12 that he interviewed that day. And if you've interviewed 12 people in a row, you can't tell male from female by the end of it, right? I'm number 12 He says, smart, aggressive, arrogant. He'll fit right in.

So I got invited to come to Intel. And it just became really glorious, starting as a technician, moved into the design team at the end of the 286, engineer number four on the 386, architect and design manager for the 486 All of that while doing my bachelors, my masters and PhD work. So it was like the best career that you could possibly have. You're learning by day and you're putting it to practice at night.