Dylan Patel on the infrastructure powering the AI revolution | The Next Big Thing

**Blake Hyman** (0:01)
All right, hello, everyone, and welcome back to our next episode of The Next Big Thing Podcast here. I'm joined by my colleague, Blake Hyman, and Dylan Patel, our new partner, founder of SemiAnalysis, the research group. It's an exciting day that we get to sort of go through the current state of the AI infrastructure landscape with Dylan. You've probably heard Dylan on many different podcasts. I follow his content all the time, as well as the newsletter on the SemiAnalysis site.
Most recently, one of the ones I saw was about data centers in space. So if anyone is interested in that topic, they have a great piece, a lot of detail out on that.
But Dylan, I would love to hear a bit about where the idea for SemiAnalysis sort of came from. I know in the Substack community these days, people are talking a lot about the revenue of the firm and the success the firm has achieved. But I feel like a lot of times you sometimes see the current level of success and forget about the journey and the origins and how much work probably went into all of it.

**Dylan Patel** (1:14)
Yeah, so I think the origin of SemiAnalysis really comes from shitposting, posting online in, let's say, a less serious manner. So when I go back to what were my first posts about semiconductors, they were when I was in my tweens, and I was just posting on the internet about chips, about smartphones, about smartphone displays, and smartphone SOCs and all these other things. Before I ever even had a smartphone, I was just obsessed with them and same with gaming hardware, PC hardware, console hardware. I was just posting about this stuff all the time on the internet, on various forums, and by the time I was 12, I was moderating a lot of forums related to Android, Apple, Google, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, the hardware topics of the world, various forms on Reddit related to these things. And so that's where the origin of it all comes from. I've always been a poster. I've always posted my opinion. I've always replied. I've always thought, taken comments. And I think one of the things the people on my team, now we're a 90-person organization, so I actually have people in marketing, they're like, Dylan, stop replying to random bozos on the internet. You're making us look bad. It's like I just have that burning desire to respond to anyone on the internet when they try and criticize me. And so that's the, maybe it's a bad thing. But basically, throughout my teenage years, I was moderating these forms. I started investing as soon as I started making money in my later teenage years. I was a quant for two years and then I started my firm. But the whole time I was posting, posting, posting, posting, posting. I had anonymous blogs, I had anonymous posts. But then in 2020, I got set up with my job. Disillusionment of being a quant is not as amazing as it seems. Yes, you make money, but it's not as amazing as it seems.
I quite quit my job and started my company.
I wasn't exactly sure where it was going to go, but I was posting on a WordPress website that I made, and I was posting under my real name, and I was posting this mix of technology, business, finance, supply chain, the things I was most interested in. Because I grew up in a small business, I grew up in a motel, my parents owned a motel in rural Georgia, and we lived in it, and I just know business. We later had gas stations too, and so lived in it, grew up in it, so I always loved business. Supply chain was always interesting from the perspective of investing, from the perspective of how things are made. I think that's always just been a knack, like how are things made. Technology aspect, of course, is super exciting, and the finance aspect are super exciting. Taking the combo that my first posts were things like, at the time, China was banning or the US was banning Huawei from access to TSMC. And then so my first post was actually about how media tech was the biggest winner, because Huawei was the number one market share in China for smartphone chips and smartphones in general. Obviously, that was going to take because they no longer had access to TSMC.
And so the US market thought, oh, Qualcomm is going to win. But Media Tech, which is the Taiwanese firm, I thought they're actually going to win a lot more share because it turns out, geopolitically, China would rather buy from a Taiwanese firm than from a US firm given we just banned Huawei. And so both firms benefited, but Media Tech benefited a lot more. So it was that mix of technology, supply chain, finance, geopolitics, all these things melded together. And over the coming year, I converted my WordPress into a sub stack at one point, started charging for it. And I was writing about all these topics across the entire semiconductor and AI supply chains.