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20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
Where this was said
Does Fireworks Eventually Have to Build Its Own Data Centres?
At 59:10 · chapter starts 49:00
Harry observes that China's lack of regulatory friction means data centres go up in weeks versus years in the US, and asks whether that translates into a structural AI advantage. Lin acknowledges the construction velocity differential but argues the US has comparable specialisation — the bottleneck is global supply chain constraints (electricians, transistors, materials) rather than policy alone. The conversation then broadens to sovereign models: the brief TikTok ban illustrated the existential vulnerability of depending on foreign-controlled infrastructure. Lin's analogy is stark — if your country's AI is like electricity, another country should never control the switch. The principle applies equally to individual enterprises: owning your intelligence is not optional.
Traditional GPU hardware depreciated over six years. Now multiple new SKUs launch annually, and the newest models always prefer the newest chips. This collapse in depreciation cycles fundamentally changes whether companies should own or rent data centre capacity.
Traditional hardware depreciation cycles of 6 years are being upended as multiple GPU SKUs launch within a single year, making older hardware obsolete faster.
Watching TikTok get briefly banned in the US crystallised a broader truth: if your critical intelligence infrastructure sits on another country's AI, it can be cut off overnight. Lin Qiao argues every nation — and every company — needs sovereign AI the same way they need sovereign electricity grids.
Meta has been building its own custom AI chips (MTIA) since at least 2018, well before the generative AI era.
