Special: 2021 China Tech Trends (with Tech Buzz China)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Your format on Tech Buzz China is, well, probably a similar amount of piles of research to Acquired. Your format is way different. You actually write the whole thing out beforehand, right?

**Rui Ma** (0:12)
Yeah, we actually do. We don't even record synchronously at this point.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:16)
That's the craziest thing. So, wait, can you explain what that means?

**Rui Ma** (0:20)
We just record separately. I record my part, and then Ying records her part.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:24)
It's more like an audio book for each episode, but sort of like two people reacting to each other who are not in real time in the same room. It's wild.
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:59)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:04)
And we are your hosts. On today's show, we have a crossover episode with Rui Ma and Ying Lu from the TechBuzz China podcast.

**David Rosenthal** (1:14)
Woo, so excited about this one.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:16)
Been thinking about doing this for a while.

**David Rosenthal** (1:18)
I know. I've been listening to Rui and Ying for many years, listening many, many times over on repeat while doing research for Meituan and PDD and Tencent and Alibaba and Xiaomi and all of our China Tech episodes. They are the best English language China Tech podcast out there. And so excited to finally do this crossover.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:40)
Yeah, no kidding. We wanted to cover a few things and thought that the best way to do a broad general China episode that's not specifically about a company would be to collaborate on one and do it together. So today we're going to talk about trends in 2021 for China Tech, how Rui and Ying do their research given that they both live in the US, their views on the China Tech landscape and how those have evolved over the last decade as that ecosystem has rapidly developed as we've covered on the show, and a little fun comparing and contrasting our two shows. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:21)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. Because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:47)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:52)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. and uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:11)
Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:26)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:43)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Now, on to our conversation with TechBuzz China. All right, Rui and Ying, great to be doing an episode with you.

**Rui Ma** (4:07)
Yeah, totally. We're big fans of Acquired. Our goal is to be like the acquired, but for China Tech.

**Ying Lu** (4:14)
Oh my God.

**David Rosenthal** (4:17)
That's true though. You guys are great.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:19)
Well, why don't we turn it over to you real quick for, give us your personal backstories, a little bit about the show. Both of you live in California, right? Not actually in China?