NVIDIA & the US Government Just Bailed out Intel, Sending the Stock Soaring w/ Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #195

Dave Blundin (0:00)

The US cannot let Intel fail. It's our one and only ChipFab company that's truly domestic.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:07)

This does remind me a bit of the 1997 investment by Microsoft. I would love to see a success story in the style of what happened with Apple after the 1997 Microsoft investment.

Dave Blundin (0:17)

It's almost identical. Everyone's lost faith in Apple was almost bankrupt. Everyone forgets that. And Bill Gates decides to make an investment and it reestablished its credibility. And then Apple went on to become the most valuable company in the world after that. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, T for Taiwan, has 66% market share in the chips that drive AI. China is only 90 miles away from Taiwan and thinks it's part of their country.

Peter Diamandis (0:43)

Where would you invest your capital knowing what you know about the massive growth we're seeing? Who wants to go first?

Dave Blundin (0:55)

Now that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:00)

Everybody welcome to Moonshots, another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. I'm here with my Moonshot mates, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin and AWG, Alex Wissner-Gross. Hey guys. So we got on text this morning and said, oh my god, there's so much news going on. We just need to spin up a WTF episode because there's breaking news that we want to share with our subscriber base. And Dave, I don't know, I want to just say thank you for everybody here rearranging your day so we can hop on this conversation. I mean, it was pretty extraordinary and Gianluca and Nick and Dana just getting all the slides together. Just, I feel like we're going to be doing an episode of this every day at the speed at which things are happening.

Dave Blundin (1:51)

Hey Peter, it's my absolute favorite thing in the world to do. And I postponed meetings with JP Morgan and a couple public company CEOs to do this. So it's a pure win for me. Things I wasn't eager to do have been moved off and things I love doing are right in front of me.

Salim Ismail (2:08)

I was talking to Alex a few days ago and I said, how do you spend your time? He goes, preparing for the pod.

Alexander Wissner-Gross (2:16)

Sad but true.

Salim Ismail (2:17)

Yeah, it's a black hole in a wonderful way.

Dave Blundin (2:22)

Today in particular is a really, really big news day, so we just have to do it. We'll cover it.

Peter Diamandis (2:27)

Again, as I say to everybody listening and watching, this is a chance where I get to upgrade my IQ points by 20 I hope you do as well. The only way to stay on top of this exponential growth, because we are such local and linear thinkers, is to constantly be upgrading or updating your belief of what is possible and where things are going. We think of our episodes here as really the news that's worth listening to. So if you want to trade the Crisis News Network at night with an hour with us, we welcome you to. All right, let's jump in. And the news here, Dave, that you texted me this morning and said, Did you see what's happening with Intel and Nvidia? And that sort of spun up the sort of the watershed moment of, okay, time to record again. So buddy, I want you to kick us off here.

Dave Blundin (3:24)

Yeah, Ray Ranger, whole day. This is such huge news. And if you go back to our August 13th podcast, which was called Tech Experts Breakdown, the Incoming AI Crypto Collision that we did with Eric Poulier, if you go to minute 56 of that podcast, you'll see us calling this out and predicting it, including the fact that Leopold Aschenbrenner, the genius we've been closely following through his hedge fund, had a half billion dollar position in options that he'd put on Intel. And so our best simulation today is that he's up about 2-300% on those options in today only, as am I, by the way. So big day for me and big day for him and a big day for us following these brainiacs, who, you know, that's why Alex is here. The world is changing so quickly and opportunities are changing so quickly. So what happened here, exactly as we had thought, the US cannot let Intel fail. It's our one and only chip fab company that's truly domestic. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, T for Taiwan, has 66% market share in the chips that drive AI.

China is only 90 miles away from Taiwan and thinks it's part of their country. And so there is no way the US government was going to let Intel fail. And then after the US government invested and bought 10% of Intel, Nvidia has followed suit. And I'm sure there's some White House pressure behind this deal. But Nvidia needs chip manufacturing. It's essentially sold out for infinite future. And the constraint to all chip creation is the fabs. Intel has fabs. And they're actually starting to work really well, too. So the stock's up 25%, 30% today alone, based on this news. More importantly, it gives Intel the capital to finish building out their 1.8 nanometer process, the NT Dengstrom, they call it, process, which is absolute cutting edge, front of the queue kind of process. And it takes the risk of complete failure kind of off the table in terms of Intel.