The internet boom built bandwidth. The AI boom is building intelligence. Mike Volpi, who helped shape Cisco’s strategy during the internet buildout, asks what that era can teach us about this one.
Mike joins a16z’s Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to compare today’s investment in GPUs, data centers, and power with the fiber boom of the late 1990s, and explain why the infrastructure could prove valuable even if the market corrects.
They also discuss NVIDIA, custom silicon, networking, and the changing economics of GPUs, plus lessons from Cisco’s acquisition machine. And Mike explains why he thinks this technology cycle could be even more consequential than the last.
