a16z Podcast: Mike Volpi on What the 1990s Internet Boom Teaches Us About the AI Buildout
a16z Podcast · rss · 2026-11-11
The a16z podcast hosts Mike Volpi, who helped shape Cisco's strategy during the internet buildout, alongside Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller, to compare today's massive investment in GPUs, data centers, and power with the late-1990s fiber boom.
Key topics:
- The internet boom built bandwidth; the AI boom is building intelligence
- Why the infrastructure could prove valuable even if the market corrects
- NVIDIA, custom silicon, networking, and the changing economics of GPUs
- Lessons from Cisco's acquisition machine
- Volpi argues this technology cycle could be even more consequential than the last
Relevant for anyone tracking AI infrastructure investment logic and compute economics through a historical lens.
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