Ep. 035 - Tech DD’s, Performance Projections, Benchmarks, Supply Chain, Investment Thesis (Consulting)| Abhilash Jain, Jordan Nanos

Jordan Nanos (0:05)

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to SemiAnalysis. My name is Jordan. I'm here with Abhilash. This week, we're going to do something a little bit different. We're not talking about an article. Instead, we're giving everybody a little bit of an explanation on the SemiAnalysis Consulting business. Abhilash leads our consulting business. He's got a great team. And a lot of people have some questions about what we do in consulting, what types of clients we serve, what are the projects that we do, and things that we've learned. This covers everything from like DDS for investors or companies that are looking at M&A activity to investors who want to go beyond the core products and customize something about one of our research products like the Accelerator Model, Data Center Model, things like that.

As well as strategy, guidance, feedback on product roadmaps, go to market activities for lots of clients and industries. So Abhilash, welcome to the show. Excited to have you today.

Abhilash Jain (0:57)

Thank you, Jordan. Excited to finally make my debut to the renowned SemiAnalysis Weekly.

Jordan Nanos (1:05)

Abhilash and his team have lots of opinions that get expressed on this podcast, but for the first time, we're going to hear it from him directly. So I'm excited for that.

Abhilash Jain (1:13)

Absolutely.

Jordan Nanos (1:14)

Okay. Give us a quick overview. What's SemiAnalysis Consulting Business? What do we do?

Abhilash Jain (1:21)

By the way, SemiAnalysis has been doing consulting ever since Dylan started SemiAnalysis, but it was only last year, I would say, when we set up our dedicated team. The reason is SemiAnalysis does a lot of things. We publish our newsletter, we have institutional models.

I think we have close to 13 to 14 different institutional models right now. But a lot of this, and we have open projects, open research projects like InfantsX and Plus and Max. There's a lot happening, but a lot of this stuff is actually very off the shelf. So if any industry participant or any investor wants to engage more deeply with SemiAnalysis, we didn't really have an operating model internally to be able to service those requests. So that's the genesis of SemiAnalysis Consulting. I think what we do is we work with various different clients on a very dedicated basis. All the work that we do is very custom. We typically staff a dedicated team for anywhere between three to four weeks to all the way from a year.

I'm happy to talk more about it, but that's essentially what we do. All the work that we do is custom.

Jordan Nanos (2:24)

Yeah. Awesome. Custom work. Maybe start by talking about the types of clients that we serve. I gave a little high level overview of the different types of projects that we've done, but yeah, take us through that.

Abhilash Jain (2:38)

Yeah.

In my opinion, I think what we're witnessing is something called, like we always talk about hardware, software co-design, right? I think in the world of AI Infra, there's something else that's also happening, which I call tech finance co-design, I would say. So we need to teach tech grows more finance. We need to teach more finance, finance grows more tech, and that's essentially what we do.

I think there are two sort of client groups that we serve. The first one is the financial institution investors, and these are large private equity funds, these are large hedge funds, who are very savvy investors, and they are very excited about investing in AI Infra. Now, when they're deciding to drop a billion dollars, two billion dollars in a chip company, in a Neo Cloud, in a data center, they want SemiAnalysis to come in and essentially help them figure out various aspects of the deal. So we do various sorts of diligence for them.

We also do a lot of thesis development for hedge funds. A lot of hedge funds are looking for the next wave. People got excited about memory, people got excited about CPU. So they're trying to think about, okay, what's next? And we also worked with a lot of hedge funds in combining various different data sources and different market narrative to figure out what's the next wave. On the other hand, we also serve a lot of industry clients. And these are, I would say, largely the hyperscalers, the AI labs, the chip companies, semis companies. And here the range of topics can be really, really large. It could range from helping a semi company figuring out their product and engineering roadmaps. Our common question is, if LLMs are evolving in a certain way, what should be the products that we should be thinking about three years out, four years out and five years out? It could also be helping certain hyperscalers figure out data center sites in remote locations in India, for example. It could also be doing go-to-market strategy for various different companies who have a strong product but don't know how to connect and figure out their customer journeys. It's a range of different options, but that's essentially the type of clients that we serve as part of SemiAnalysis Consulting.