Building the Real-World Infrastructure for AI, with Google, Cisco & a16z

The a16z Show

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI isn’t just changing software, it’s causing the biggest buildout of physical infrastructure in modern history. In this episode, Raghu Raghuram (a16z) speaks with Amin Vahdat, VP and GM of AI and Infrastructure at Google, and Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, about the unprecedented scale of what’s being built — from chips to power grids to global data centers. They discuss the new “AI industrial revolution,” where power, compute, and network are the new scarce resources; how geopolitical competition is shaping chip design and data center placement; and why the next generation of AI infrastructure will demand co-design across hardware, software, and networking. The conversation also covers how enterprises will adapt, why we’re still in the earliest phase of this CapEx supercycle, and how AI inference, reinforcement learning, and multi-site computing will transform how systems are built and run.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The good news is infrastructure sexy again, so that's kind of cool.
0:03.5	This is like the combination of the build out of the internet, the space race, and the Manhattan project all put into one.
0:10.3	Where there's a geopolitical implication of it, there's an economic implication, there's a national security implication, and then there's just a speed implication that's pretty profound.
0:19.1	I mean, I think it's easy to say. I've seen nothing like this. I'm fairly certain no one's seen anything like this. The Internet in the late 90s, early 2000s was big, and we felt like, oh, my gosh, can't believe the build out the rate. This makes it, I mean, 10x is an understatement. It's 100x what the internet was. The AI boom isn't just changing software.
0:40.0	It's transforming the physical infrastructure that runs it. Today, you'll hear a conversation with
0:45.4	Amin Vadat from Google, G2 Patel from Cisco, and Raghu Ragaram from A16Z on what it takes
0:51.4	to build the real-world systems behind large-scale AI, from chips and power to data centers and networking.
0:58.0	They discuss the scale of the current buildout, the new constraints on compute power and interconnect, and how specialization in hardware and architecture is reshaping both the industry and global geopolitics.
1:09.0	It's a grounded look at how infrastructure itself is being reinvented for the AI era and what comes next.
1:14.6	Let's get into it.
1:16.6	What better time and place to talk infrastructure?
1:20.6	All right.
1:21.6	So we were back in the green room and just as the first question was getting answered, I got cut off. So this could be
1:29.8	an entire repeat for all I know. So anyway, let's go. The first question is similar. So both of
1:36.4	you, firstly, welcome and thank you for being here. And I hope you'll have a great day and a half as
1:41.9	well. Both have you been in the industry for a while,
1:46.0	and both of you have lived through many infrastructure cycles, right?
1:50.0	So have you seen anything like this cycle from your vantage point,
1:55.0	not from an investor vantage point, but from your internal vantage point
2:00.0	where you are responsible for building things and planning for things and so on.
2:05.3	Anyone of you, where do you want to start?
2:06.7	You want to start, Amin?
	...

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