a16z launches Machine Age Fund: the infrastructure bet beneath AI models
a16z Podcast · rss · 2026-08-28
Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, Raghu Raghuram, and Erik Torenberg discuss a16z's new Machine Age Fund and the infrastructure buildout behind AI — chips, memory, networking, power, cooling, and data centers.
Their central thesis: AI's bottleneck is shifting from the models themselves to everything beneath them. Hyperscaler CapEx is surging, critical components are booked years in advance, and each new generation of reasoning and agents demands dramatically more compute.
They argue this cycle differs from previous infrastructure booms: problems once constrained by engineering can increasingly be attacked with capital and compute. They also cover where next-gen infrastructure companies will emerge, why founders are returning to hard technical problems, and what rebuilding the computing stack for the Machine Age will take.
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