Descriptions:
Andreessen Horowitz partners Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and Ragu Gururaaj sit down to introduce the firm’s new ‘Machine Age Fund,’ a vehicle dedicated specifically to AI infrastructure investment — hardware, chips, power, and materials all the way down to copper mining. The central thesis: the AI model itself is no longer the bottleneck. The constraint has moved ‘south of the model,’ to the physical supply chain that feeds it. One illustrative data point from the conversation: a leading memory vendor told them current demand would take three full years of production capacity to satisfy.
The partners track a striking behavioral shift among elite founders. Where hardware and deep-tech deals once represented roughly 3–5% of top-tier deal flow, that figure has climbed to 20–30% — a signal the firm treats as more reliable than macro forecasting. The conversation also covers AI agents, with the partners describing the evolution from browser extensions to fully autonomous ’employee’-style agents with their own computers and browsers, and the cultural and operational challenges of integrating them into organizations like a16z itself.
For investors and operators tracking where capital is flowing in the AI stack, this discussion provides a high-level but substantive map of where Andreessen Horowitz sees the next major infrastructure build-out happening — and why the business model of the AI wave is placing unique stress on components that were never designed for these workloads.
📺 Source: a16z · Published August 28, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
