The 'AI Coachella' prof's plan for the data center backlash
Anjney Midha makes his first detailed case for AMP. Also: The ACCESS launch party, catch me on Good Work, and my weekend reading list.
Anjney Midha hasn’t said much publicly about AMP, the AI compute startup he left Andreessen Horowitz to raise billions of dollars for. He’s starting to now.
AMP wants to be what Midha calls "an independent system operator of the grid" for AI compute. The idea is modeled on PJM Interconnect, the utility that pools electricity capacity across the Northeast. AMP doesn't own data centers or GPUs directly. Instead, it pools capacity across clouds and meters it to frontier research teams on demand, "kind of like a dorm meal plan," according to Midha.
Midha correctly posits that many AI startups are miserably undersupplied with compute. AMP pegs idle FLOPs inside independent AI labs at 30 to 40 percent. The company is broken into two businesses: a venture arm that Midha said has "billions of dollars” in commitments and will be announced soon, and a grid system that gives portfolio companies compute at cost (any excess is resold at “a modest profit”). Thousands of chips are already running in production through AMP today, he said, with several hundred megawatts of capacity coming online by year-end.
Anjney joins this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger. You can watch the conversation above or listen to it in your podcast player of choice by clicking this link.
When we recorded with him earlier this week, Midha dialed in from the offices of Periodic Labs, the AI material science startup started by ex-OpenAI leaders that he helped incubate, and where he spends three days a week. He had taught at Stanford earlier that afternoon, where his CS153 class had been dubbed “AI Coachella” for its speaker lineup that included Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Andrej Karpathy, and Ben Horowitz.
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
The ACCESS launch party and live show
Ellis Hamburger and I started the podcast together in September and have been heads down ever since. We're inviting previous guests and friends to hang out for an evening to celebrate the show’s launch and watch a live episode with Substack CEO Chris Best. Invites have started already going out, but if you’re interested in attending on May 14th in SF, let me know.
Catch me on Good Work
Dan Toomey and the folks at Morning Brew run one of my favorite YouTube channels, so when Dan asked me to come on for an episode about attempting to explain how Meta works, it was an easy yes.
Weekend list
What I’ll be reading/watching/listening:
Sam Altman’s texts to Mira Murati turned into a “2011 style emo teenage heartthrob anthem.”
“A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready.” (The New York Times)
A profile of Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao (The Wall Street Journal)
“How Anthropic’s Mythos Threw the White House AI Strategy Into Chaos” (The Wall Street Journal)
Sergey Brin’s Girlfriend Tells It Like It Is (The Free Press)
“We Spent 10 Days Touring Chinese AI Labs. Here’s What We Saw.” (Sail Media)
ICYMI
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