If you were in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, today's AI boom might feel familiar. In 1998 and 1999, internet traffic was roughly doubling every six to nine months. That was extraordinary growth in demand, and still, that pales in comparison to what we're seeing unfold now. Today, the four largest U.S. cloud companies are looking at more than $700 billion in capital spending this year, and the cumulative AI infrastructure spending is projected to reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030. Nvidia arguably fired the starting gun in AI chips when Jensen Huang hand-delivered its DGX-1 to OpenAI in 2016. Today, it is a household name deeply embedded in the AI ecosystem, working with near-exclusive supply and investment deals. Part of the answer is that scale costs you speed, though when going up against an execution machine like Nvidia this is simply the baseline you have to solve for. The pace of change in AI outruns anything we saw in previous tech cycles: Model generations turn over...
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