Microsoft's Head of Cloud & AI on the AI Buildout's Risks and ROI — With Scott Guthrie

Big Technology Podcast

Alex Kantrowitz

Technology, Religion & Spirituality, Business News, Business, Religion, Science, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Entrepreneurship, Management, Marketing, Politics, News Commentary, Government, Investing, Tech News, Social Sciences, News

4.6 • 395 Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Scott Guthrie is the executive vice president of Cloud and AI at Microsoft. Guthrie joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the tech industry's massive AI infrastructure buildout and whether it is overdoing it with the hundreds of billions of investment. Guthrie discusses the way Microsoft thinks about its OpenAI investment, whether it's worth investing in scaling pre-training, and Silicon Valley's growing debt problem Tune in for the second half where we discuss the longevity of the GPU, custom silicon, and competing with NVIDIA. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected]

Transcript

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0:00.0	Microsoft's head of cloud and AI joins us as we ask.
0:03.8	Is this AI buildout going too far?
0:06.3	That's coming up right after this.
0:08.6	Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond.
0:14.9	We're joined today by Scott Guthrie.
0:16.5	He's the head of cloud and AI at Microsoft, and he is the perfect guest to give us some context on the massive, and some would say insane buildout of AI data centers taking place today. What does it mean? Is it going too far? What will lead to? Scott, I'm so thrilled to have you on the show. Welcome. It's good to be here, Alex. Thanks for having me. All right, let me take you through the headlines over the past couple of weeks.
0:39.0	It's crazy that this has just been over the past few weeks.
0:41.7	But here we go.
0:43.2	Invidia agreed or announced that it would invest up
0:45.8	to $100 billion in Open AI, starting out with $10 billion.
0:50.6	Oracle announced it would invest $30 billion in Open AI a $30 billion build out with with the company.
0:57.0	Anthropic raised 13 billion. So, you know, we're just talking about a cool 143 billion. No big deal. Is this crazy? Is this over investment?
1:06.0	Well, I think there's a great question. I'm sure that's top of mind for everyone.
1:11.6	I think stepping back for a moment, I would say, if you look at AI and the impact I think it's going to have in the economy,
1:18.6	it's going to be, I think, the most profound technology shift in our lifetimes.
1:24.6	And so I think if you look at the long-term trend, I don't see, I don't worry about
1:35.7	overinvesting. I think there will be a question on the horizon of different companies or making
1:41.1	different strategies in terms of their investment and how they get the return in the one, two, three year horizon. So, you know, am I going to say that every company is perfectly timed? I don't, I'm not going to make that assertion. But at the same time, I do think the long-term secular trend of AI is going to be that we're going to need more infrastructure. There's going to be more ROI from it, and it's going to be more widely used.
2:01.7	And so, you know, I think directionally from an industry perspective, the investments do make
2:07.2	sense and will ultimately yield pretty profound results.
2:12.7	So you think that this level of build out is healthy?
2:16.9	I think we definitely are not nearly at the point
	...

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