20VC: "Anti-Data Centres is a Chinese Psyop" | How Many Planned Data Centers Will Actually Get Built? | Is Energy AI's Biggest Bottleneck? With Thomas Sohmers, Co-Founder @ Positron
episode
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
1h 11m
1 speaker
5 chapters
transcribed 1 hour ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Why is anti‑data‑center sentiment described as a Chinese psyop?
I would say I'm overall opposed to you know the pace of the frontier direction it's going in. The scariest thing to me on on the political spectrum and the way all of this being treated is that it's now become a almost unifying issue on left and right about being anti data centers. I think that is almost entirely a Chinese psyop. A single in and out uses, you know, more more water than you know.
The largest data centers in the United States. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now we have probably one of the most important times in history for technology. We have the biggest model providers saying we need to pace the frontier. But what does that actually mean in reality? How possible is it? What does it mean for the threat from China? What does it mean for the infrastructure layer moving forwards? We have a true expert of the space on the show today, in the form of Thomas Somers. He's the co-founder and chairman of Depositor on AI. They just raised an $875 million Series C at a $5 billion valuation. They've got some of the best investors in the business, including the one and only Gavin Baker at Atreides and many more great names.
Thomas did not hold back in this episode, and it's this beautiful combination of incredible education on the infrastructure that powers this economy for AI. And then also, I don't know how to say it. But analytical gossip would be a more intellectual way of saying incredible discussion about what we can expect in the next few months from the biggest players in this space. But before we dive into the show today, the best model for your application might not exist yet. The most ambitious AI teams are training open models to beat the frontier in their domain. Now, on November the 3rd in San Francisco, Forge by Fireworks brings those teams together. People like Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, Michelle Catasta, president and head of AI at Replit, Lin Quao, CEO of Fireworks, and more, to hear how AI leaders are taking control of their differentiation, margins, and roadmap by owning their intelligence.
Learn how they're building it with inference, training, and intelligent routing. Forge is free to attend, but space is limited. Apply today at fireworks.ai forward. Forward slash forge. While Fireworks AI powers product intelligence, Asana keeps the work moving. Most companies have tried AI, most aren't seeing results. Not because AI doesn't work, it's because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready to go AI. AI teammates, pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded, in your workflows, ready to deliver.
With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal. Whether you're a team of 10 or a team of 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N. While Asana organizes the work, Superhuman speeds up the day. Can I be honest with you for a second? Here's what my week actually looks like: back-to-back meetings all day, and the real pressure builds up in the gaps between them. I'll come out of six founder meetings with a whole stack of follow-ups waiting, and my inbox, it's hundreds of messages. And somewhere in there is the one thing that really matters, which I always tell my mother is her. I've tried every AI tools for this, but they always lived in another tab.
I'd have to stop, go find it, paste in the context, write the perfect prompt. It was just enough friction that it never really stuck. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly, totally different. It's right there where you need it, when you need it, in the doc, when I'm reading, the email I'm writing. When a thread gets dense, I highlighted and ask Go to pull out what matters without losing my place. And after a run of back-to-backs, I asked what was actually decided, and Go turns it into clear action items or drafts the reply I need to send.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why is anti‑data‑center sentiment described as a Chinese psyop?
0:00–22:07
2
How does inference hardware differ from training hardware for AI?
22:07–28:32
3
What are the main challenges of memory bandwidth versus compute in AI inference?
28:32–44:46
4
Why is there a misalignment between GPU FLOPS growth and memory bandwidth improvement?
44:46–56:54
5
How do token economics and cash‑vs‑un‑cash token pricing affect AI profitability?
56:54–1:11:41
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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