Three years ago, Sequoia partner David Cahn was one of the first people to do the math and put a number on the implications of Silicon Valley’s titanic spend on AI infrastructure.
In 2023, he was reacting to Nvidia’s reported annual GPU revenue of $50 billion. Starting with that figure, and adding in the implied costs of operating the data centers and the margins for their operators, he deduced that $200 billion in revenue would be required to pay back the up-front investment.