Erin Price-Wright

speaker

1,223 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 5 Aug

Erin Price-Wright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 3.

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The a16z Show · Designing the Physical World with AI · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

It's also manufacturing.

And Alex said, OK, we have this very high optimization function on effectively what the plan looks like.

And then there will be a bunch of robotics on the manufacturing.

We already have the robotics.

The electronic industry has had robots for years.

The biggest problem

is that there is a 80-20 robotic automation versus like manual labor.

And so right now, like nobody has really bridged that gap in the United States.

So what I am like where we are working on a diet.

So normally, there's a process called surface mount technology.

So this means that there is a robot that will basically place every single component on top of a circuit board.

And then you bake it in an oven, and you're done.

But the 20% that is very, very hard to automate is there are some components that will not fit that very nice mold.

Maybe it's a very big transformer that needs to be soldered with a different process.

Maybe it's something that hugs the PCB.

Even the assembly of the circuit board itself into an enclosure, that's usually not fully automated as well.

So there's been companies like Foxconn, for example, for Apple, or like Pegatron, that have solved that problem with labor.

And that makes complete sense for certain segments and in certain geographies, but you're not going to double the production capacity for data centers in the US by just relying on labor alone.

Also, you're not going to be able to reduce the time cycle that it takes to bring up a data center from four years to two years if you're not able to redesign the boards, redesign them for manufacturing, manufacture them at scale in a constricted timeline.

So what we really are bullish on is not really AI completely automating away design work.

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