Groq Founder Jonathan Ross: OpenAI & Anthropic Will Build Their Own Chips & Will NVIDIA Hit $10TRN

Podcast: 20VC
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Jonathan Ross — founder and CEO of Groq
Duration: ~1 hour 31 minutes
Listen: Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Jonathan Ross, founder of AI chip company Groq, on the geopolitics of compute, the economics of inference, and why speed is the most undervalued metric in AI.

Compute Is the New Oil

The countries that control compute will control AI. And you cannot have compute without energy. The AI race is fundamentally an energy race. China is building 150 nuclear reactors. Japan allocated $65 billion and is reactivating nuclear plants. Europe is at risk of becoming a tourist economy if it does not fix its energy policy.

The Insatiable Demand for Inference

If OpenAI or Anthropic were given twice their current inference compute, within a month their revenue would nearly double. The market is that constrained. This is not a bubble — this is a gusher. The current market looks like early oil drilling: lumpy, with a few massive winners and lots of dry holes. Thirty-six companies generate 99% of AI revenue today.

Speed Drives Engagement

Every 100 milliseconds of improvement in AI response time yields roughly 8% better conversion rates. This is the same lesson early internet companies learned. Faster products create a dopamine cycle. Speed is not a technical detail. It is a business model.

OpenAI and Anthropic Will Build Their Own Chips

Not because they can outperform Nvidia. Because they need to control their own destiny. Nvidia’s monopsony on high-bandwidth memory creates supply constraints that throttle everyone else. Building chips is brutally hard — only 14% work on the first attempt, and Google needed three simultaneous efforts to get one that worked. But the moat is worth it: successful chips create a three-year advantage.

NVIDIA at $10 Trillion

Ross says he would not be surprised if NVIDIA hits $10 trillion in five years. The technical gap may narrow, but the brand and ecosystem moat is enormous. Nvidia’s monopsony on HBM gives it a structural advantage that competitors cannot easily replicate.

AI Will Create Labor Shortages, Not Unemployment

Ross argues the opposite of the doomer narrative. AI creates deflationary pressure across the economy, meaning people need less money to maintain their lifestyle. They will work fewer hours, retire earlier, and entirely new industries will emerge — just like the agricultural revolution moved 98% of the workforce off farms into roles that did not exist yet.

LLMs Are the Telescope of the Mind

Ross’s closing thought: LLMs make us feel small right now, like Galileo’s telescope did. But in a hundred years, we will see that intelligence is more vast than we imagined, and we will think that is beautiful.

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