The $10T AI Buildout Has a Photonics Problem

AI's next infrastructure bottleneck? It's everything connecting them. As AI models grow, they increasingly need to run across massive clusters of GPUs. Traditional copper interconnects are running out of steam, pushing the industry toward optical interconnects and silicon photonics. I sat down with Thema's Herwig Van Hove and Yannick De Koninck in Monaco to go deep on the photonics supply chain powering the next generation of AI infrastructure. Yannick spent five years at NVIDIA, where he helped build its silicon photonics technology from scratch to product-ready maturity. He left what he calls the “golden palace” to join Thema and help build large-scale photonics manufacturing in Europe. Herwig comes from deep tech investing and saw a different problem. The innovation was ready, but the industrial supply chain wasn't prepared for the speed or scale of AI demand. We get into › Why copper is running out of steam inside AI infrastructure › How photonics could reduce the networking and energy bottlenecks facing AI factories › Why the photonics supply chain wasn't prepared for the AI boom › What Yannick learned building silicon photonics at NVIDIA › Thema's plan to begin production in 2027 and build a major photonics manufacturing platform in Europe Thema believes the opportunity extends far beyond a single component. “If you look at an AI factory today, half of that is GPUs, but the other half is the technology to interconnect these GPUs.” Herwig believes Europe has a rare opportunity to turn decades of photonics research into industrial scale, pointing to ASML as proof that Europe has done it before. Recorded at the Strike x Sourcery Summit in the South of France Herwig Van Hove: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herwigvanhove https://www.linkedin.com/in/herwigvanhove/?skipRedirect=true Yannick De Koninck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-de-koninck-63304314 https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-de-koninck-63304314/ Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/HfSIbxNv-To 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Zone https://zonefrontier.com/—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com https://zonefrontier.com/ • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  The potential of photonics.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  The technology to interconnect these GPUs.

• 0:14Speaker 03

  Global payroll and HR platform.

• 0:16Speaker 04

  Eight billion operational data points.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Scale-ups over startups. You'd rather have a million of something than one of anything.

• 0:22Speaker 04

  Building the intelligence layer for the fence. There isn't enough power. There's not enough memory chips.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  We're at the end of physics of what we can still do.

• 0:41Molly O'Shea?

  Yannick and Herwig, welcome to Sorcery, N-Strike's annual gala. We're here in Monaco and we're going to go deep into photonics and what you're building with FEMA. But before we get into that, we're going to go into a long conversation on photonics. So Yannick, I'd love to start with your background and then Herwig, we'll get into yours. How did you get into photonics?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  So I was one of these nerdy kids who locked himself up in his bedroom playing Lego all day. So naturally I went to engineering school and it was 20 years ago. And back then, silicon photonics was this niche upcoming branch in engineering with no prospect for any job at all. So I decided to jump on that ship.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I did my PhD in that field and then by that time I had the opportunity to move to San Diego to join a startup company there that was trying to commercialize silicon photonics, one of the first companies to do that and to successfully do that.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I moved back to IMEC where I worked on laser integration for silicon photonics for a while. And then five years ago, I joined Nvidia. Back then, when I still had to explain to people what Nvidia actually was. And so we started from scratch. Built the silicon photonics technology there into a product-ready maturity.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  And now I'm starting at FEMA.

• 2:16Molly O'Shea?

  Herwig, how did you get involved?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  So I've been investor most of my life, turned operator very late. But I've been focused on deep tech for quite a while. And so got involved in the fascinating world of photonics almost a decade ago. And realized three, four years ago that the train was leaving the station and there were some gaping holes in the supply chain. And that is what we're trying to solve with FEMA. Realizing that, you know, this visionary choice of Yannick 20 years ago to study the field of silicon photonics was something that has put Belgium on the map

• 3:02Speaker 01

  and has created a talent base that's broad and deep. And I've spent my life selecting, honing and nurturing talent. And so that's what we're going to hope and do with this.

• 3:13Molly O'Shea?

  So let's lay out the state of the market and how chips have gotten to this point. Why copper is going out of date and why there's a focus on photonics and lasers. Can you explain a little bit of that and also why Europe?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  So I think the market is the part that really dragged me into it. We saw a much bigger opportunity than what most people in the field were seeing. That was because we were talking to the CTOs of data centers and realized indeed what their need was and how photonics could help solve this. And we were listening very carefully when some of the gurus of the ecosystem, like Andy Bechtelstein, were quoting numbers that far exceeded what even the most optimistic analysts were saying. And we felt that they were, you know, very well informed.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And so that's what pushed us to do this.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  And to answer your question about where we are today. So if you think about AI, you think about GPUs, right? You think about these compute engines that actually run the models. But the models have gotten so large that they no longer fit on a single GPU. So what we need to do is we need to interconnect multiple GPUs together to run these models. Traditionally, that's been copper interconnects. But as these GPUs get faster, they need more data. They need more data at a faster rate and copper is running out of steam. And that's why we're transitioning to optical interconnects, which can, which bring much higher data transfer bandwidth.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  So yeah, that's where.

• 5:03Molly O'Shea?

  So I recently interviewed Tony Kim of BlackRock in Paris at the Raze AI Summit. And we were breaking down the entire industry. He says there's a $10 trillion rebuild that's happening. And one of the most affected and going to be the most effective places for that spend is in these data centers because the current old infrastructure of a data center is not built for AI. It's completely inefficient. It takes a lot of water. It takes a lot of energy. And the chips that are being used in those are just, they're just all outdated and they cannot handle the parameter models that are in the market. So I would love to get kind of an understanding from one of you,

• 5:43Molly O'Shea?

  the difference in architecture of those data centers and how they're transforming with this new build.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  That's probably for you.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you compare a traditional hyperscale data center to a modern AI factory, one of the big differences is that the, there is way more traffic between different servers. If you think about your traditional Google search five years ago, it was basically your traffic is routed to one computer that finds the answer and sends that answer back. Now, if you think about modern AI infrastructure, there's, as I said before, the models no longer fit on a single GPU. So there's already GPU to GPU communication. But now in the age of agentic AI, there's a model that is doing a call to some tool which is on a different server

• 6:38Speaker 02

  that's returning the results to the GPU. So there's a lot of traffic within the data center, which is very sensitive to latency. Basically the time between when all these different calculations can run. So what that means in reality is that you need a much flatter network. Instead of a really deep hierarchical tree of switches, you need a much flatter network. That means far more connections between, direct connections between switches and GPUs. So basically a much denser network than what we had in the traditional hyperscale.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  If you're asking a CTO of a data center, what keeps you awake at night? Okay, the energy consumption is answer number one because it's existential to them. They don't know how to solve it. Their CEO is saying, we need to grow, we need to grow. And he's saying, okay, but where? Because nobody can deliver the grid. Google negotiated for three years with Amsterdam and had to move its plans to, actually now Belgium, because they simply can't get the grid. And so that obviously with the ambitious growth plans that they have requires a much more fundamental solution that can scale to the same size as the problem.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Right? And so there are many data centers, there are many more being planned. Therefore, you know, upgrading the grid or building new power plants cannot happen in the time that is required. And that's where, you know, every deep tech paradigm shift needs a killer app for photonics. More than 20 years in the making, 30 years in the making on the science side. Energy consumption by data centers and AI is that killer app. And so now we get to where we are today, which is, that's great. But nobody was prepared for the speed of change. The speed of change happened November 22, ChatGPT comes out.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  It goes viral like it's never seen before. And with the growth of that came this requirement or this realization, okay, we need to switch to photonics. Nvidia took the lead in that. They were, I mean, they had been talking about photonics for a long time, but they said, okay, we need to make the switch happen. 24, they were even louder about it. 25, they really pushed the market. In 26, they showed the market what they meant with their investments in Lumentum, Coherent. They've invested 4X the total market size in the first six months of this year. And so now everybody realizes, oh, the supply chain is not ready. The innovation is ready.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  The photonics scientists have done a lot of work. The photonic designers have done a lot of work. But you need to work that all the way back to the beginning, which is, you know, all the way from the raw material over the tooling, over the infrastructure to build. And I think that's where the pain point sits today. And it's part of what we are trying to solve.

• 9:48Molly O'Shea?

  So how many photonic companies are out there? I interviewed the Lumentum CEO, Michael Hurston. And even just looking at that company, they are spilling over with demand. Their stock went up 1,000 times in a year. Insane. And he had like just stepped in maybe a year and a half ago. So he like really came in at an opportune time. But I'm curious, like, what does the state of the market look like for the companies that are existing? And how does it all work together?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I think the, again, what needs to be understood is the shift in size of the market. Photonics for years was an academic endeavor with some applications that was being prepared for in the supply chain at that scale. And now, all of a sudden, Nvidia steps in and says, no, no, guys, this is much, much bigger. And so, you know, obviously, Lumentum Co here and there are the two leading companies in the West doing this. They're the only ones scaled at that size. If you look at the rest of the industry, the traditional players, the TSMCs, global

• 10:56Speaker 01

  foundries, towers of this world, have made a tremendous effort investing in the part that fits in their supply, in their production process, which is the front end, the silicon photonics, making the wafers. But if you deliver a wafer to Nvidia, that's not what they ordered. They ordered a final chip. So there's a lot of other things required. Lasers, first and foremost, which is what Lumentum and others are making. And so, that's going to have to scale by a lot. And that's challenging because the throughput of the machines is not at all where it needs

• 11:37Speaker 01

  to be, the efficiency, the yield is not what it's supposed to be, and the substrates, the raw material is really, really cornered. The market is, I mean, there's only a handful of suppliers. And on top of all these problems, you now have the East-West divide, which is getting quite problematic. So in all of that, we think Europe is in a sweet spot. Because in Europe, you have industrial capacity that was available, industrial infrastructure that was available, that's what we bought. You have photonic talent that has been trained for decades.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  You have industrial talent that was available because all the big foundries closed. And so, the combination of all of this, in addition with a desire of European sovereignty, makes it we're like in an ideal spot to do this, to do this from Europe.

• 12:40Molly O'Shea?

  So let's go to the founding of the company and how you guys came together. What was that process like?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. We had been building the concept of a pure-play photonic foundry at a much larger scale. We were looking around, we were seeing that all the big guys were doing the front end of the process, as I said, the silicon wafers. And we were seeing a lot of innovation happening, but that was mostly university spin-out scale. And so, there wasn't really an industrial player in the middle. And as we were making plans in 23, 24 to do this, there was, I guess, some serendipity

• 13:25Speaker 01

  involved in that a large-scale European foundry went out of business. And so, we took the occasion, we jumped on it, we bought it, and it delivered, I think, a very nice combination. One, 20 kilometers away from IMEC, world-leading research center, lots of talent. Two, lots of industrial talent, as I said, an infrastructure that was ready to go right at the time when everybody needs it. Because when you want to build a foundry of this size, you're talking about a three-to-five year project. It's between getting the permits and the licenses and building that whole, it's not

• 14:09Speaker 01

  just clean rooms, the infrastructure is quite complex. So having all of it ready to go in 24 was, you know, a serendipitous event, I'll call it that. And so, that's where we jumped on it. And then, we started talking to both sides at the same time. When I say both sides, we started talking to the industrial talent and the photonic talent and said, look, Europe has invested, successfully invested, for 20, 30 years in photonic innovation. This is the time for industrialization. And, you know, Yannick and others jumped on board instantly.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  So that's where we are.

• 14:55Molly O'Shea?

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• 15:36Molly O'Shea?

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• 16:19Molly O'Shea?

  Visit turing.com/sorcery. Yannick, from a technical standpoint, where are you at?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  So yeah, I was in a great spot at Nvidia, right? We were building the next generation of chips, and I wasn't planning to go anywhere. But when I started to talk to Herwig, and I learned about the ambition of this enterprise and what he was planning to do, I realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to join a mission that's going to solve some of the core problems that are slowing down probably one of the biggest, or the biggest technological revolution that I will witness in my lifetime.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  So I decided to leave the golden palace and jump onto the pirate ship and set sail.

• 17:15Molly O'Shea?

  Selfish question, what is it like at Nvidia? What have you learned there? Like operating principles? What is it actually like?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  It's an incredible company. It's, it feels like a startup, it's very agile. When the idea is to fail fast, so we start building stuff, if it doesn't work, move to something new. It's, in my experience, a very apolitical company. It's, the org chart is just a piece of paper. If there's a project and you can contribute, you contribute to that project, doesn't matter where you are in that, in the org chart. So yeah, it's, it's an incredible company.

• 18:09Molly O'Shea?

  And then, for people who don't know what IMEC is, can you also explain IMEC and where it fits in the stack?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Sure. So IMEC is a...

• 18:17Molly O'Shea?

  And it's not IMAC, by the way.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  No, IMEC. Interuniversity Microelectronics Center. So microelectronics center that tells you something about how old this institution is. It started over 30 years ago and has been doing, has been spearheading research initially in the area of electronics, but since sometime also much broader area, one of these is photonics. So they started photon, they were, IMEC was one of the birthplaces of silicon photonics in the world and has grown to be the number one research center when it comes to advanced

• 19:04Speaker 02

  electronics technologies in the world.

• 19:07Molly O'Shea?

  And where are you guys at in terms of commercial progress to date? When are you going to start rolling out your customers?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Our biggest challenge is the timeline customers are putting in front of us. The good news is that the volumes they're asking for even surpass our wildly ambitious projections. So that's certainly very positive.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  The constraints for us now, the whole market coherent, Lumentum and others, everybody is facing the same constraints. The tool builders are not building anywhere near enough tools. And the tools themselves need to be further improved for throughput, for efficiency, for yield. And then even more problematic, the substrates, so the raw material. And so here's the good news. As I said, Europe has been investing successfully in innovation. And so some of these problems, even though they didn't anticipate this shift, were being researched.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And so throughout Europe, Greece, Germany, Spain, France, Switzerland for sure, there has been a pipeline being built on tackling individual technical challenges around this. And so to answer your question, our timeline is to start producing next year in 27 and work towards a full ramp up by 28. So our timelines are short. And but but Europe is is

• 21:02Speaker 01

  is wide awake and and and ready to go. And we can, we feel it. That's not just a slogan, we feel it every day. So there is a lot of collaboration going on. And we're finally starting to to really work cross borders. And yeah, very optimistic about about Europe playing a significant and Thema playing a significant role in this.

• 21:25Molly O'Shea?

  Has it been hard to hire?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  That was the question I got most before I started because I was all alone. Everybody said, where are you going to find the talent? We are really enthusiastic about the people that are joining us. That's true for the board, where we have three of the most senior people of IMAC joined our board. Obviously, people like Yannick from Nvidia, but we have people from AWS. We have people from TSMC, Lamb Research, like the top companies. There's a lot of talent, many of them are European. Because what Yannick didn't say is that he chose a niche field to go and study in.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  But then you have the choice, you either go abroad to work, at least at the time, or you become a banker. So it's either or. And what we're hoping to build with Thema is, you know, homegrown magnet for talent that becomes a self sustaining, a self sustaining ecosystem of innovation and industrial production. And so the question to your answer is no. We have, we have been very fortunate with with attracting talent.

• 22:41Molly O'Shea?

  So Europe's been waiting for this?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Europe's been waiting, Europe's been waiting for this. If you read the the website of the European Council on the European Chip Act Two, they say that they really want to prioritize photonics. Within photonics, they want to really focus on industrialization, pure play. So it's almost like reading a definition of Thema. And I think that's, you know, it has to do with European sovereignty, but it's also got to do with Europe realizes that it has what it takes to not just play, but actually win in this game. One of my favorite statistics from one of our board members,

• 23:25Speaker 01

  who was the visionary professor who founded the photonics department at the University of Ghent.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Between 2000 and 2015, there were 4,000 peer reviewed white papers on photonics globally. Thirty five percent of them came from the University of Ghent. I think with the exception of Biscoff and Chocolate, Belgium has no dominance like that in any other field.

• 23:54Molly O'Shea?

  I'm curious for your, both of your answers for this question. But if you, I don't know if you travel to America much, what your exposure is like. But I'm very curious for both of your answers for what do you think the biggest misconceptions are with European AI?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I have to think about that.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Biggest misconceptions on European AI? Maybe I'll flip it around so I can tell you what American tier one potential customers asked us when they started speaking to us, which in and of itself was surprising. We were a startup with with two people at that point in time. So they shouldn't be talking to us, but they were. And what did they challenge us with? What did, what did they ask us? Said, one is, you know, can you find the funding? Two, can you find the talent? Three, can you find the machines and the substrates and everything else?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And within all of that, how on earth are you going to respect the timelines we require from you? So the conception of Europe-

• 25:12Molly O'Shea?

  Heard about the summer's here.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So the conception of Europe is that it's slow, it's committee driven decision making. And so what we're definitely incorporating in in Thema is like what Yannick said. You know, this culture of fail fast, make decisions, drive forward, don't expect a hundred percent perfect information. That may not be very European, but you know, the world is globalized. We're awake and we're going to adhere to, you know, we're going to take the best of the American culture as well in in the firm.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I was in California last week. And when I drove from San Francisco Airport to Santa Clara, along the highway, there's all these billboards on AI stuff. So you can feel there's incredible excitement about AI and and the-

• 26:06Molly O'Shea?

  I don't think many people like those billboards that live there.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  That's another thing, but you can feel the excitement, right? And I think we have a very similar excitement here in Europe. We may not be as vocal about it, but we're going to turn that into, that excitement into a reality.

• 26:22Molly O'Shea?

  Is is there as much hate for data centers here as there is in America? I mean, it's it's a huge media propaganda thing. I'll be clear with that in America, but like, I'm really curious how it's playing out here.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Europe doesn't have the same, the same, obviously, network of data centers than the US has. The regulations here are a lot stricter. And so, I mean, I would almost flip it around. That's the opportunity for us, right? If we can help build the infrastructure that makes this whole business a lot more energy efficient, then hopefully we will also start building out in in Europe our own homegrown data center network, which may look very different than the mega hyperscalers that the US has built. But you know, that's part of the problem that we're trying to solve.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  So so Europe doesn't have the same aversion versus towards it because it simply doesn't have the problem because it was regulated before the problem arose.

• 27:28Molly O'Shea?

  What are the timelines that you think upon? I ask this to people all the time. I talk to aerospace companies, they're like, we're in dog years. Like a month is like 10 years for us. But then you have like other companies that are like a year. But anyways, what timeline do you think upon? And what are you most looking forward to within that timeline?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  We're getting ready for production in 27. What I'm looking most forward to is is is indeed proving the incredible gaps that we're going to cover between from lab to fab. And we have the right team on board to do that. And there is still a lot of ground to be covered. I wouldn't call it low hanging fruit, but you know, the the experience of the team combined with the photonics talent is going to allow us to to to beat expectations on that. And so that's what I'm looking forward to. The bar is high, but I think we can beat expectations.

• 28:29Molly O'Shea?

  Yannick, what are you most looking forward to?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Just getting started and see how the community reacts,

• 28:38Speaker 02

  adjust to that and and build some world class manufacturing capability here in Europe.

• 28:45Molly O'Shea?

  I mean, you're coming from a very competitive company. So do you bring that competition with you? Is that why this is so enticing?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. I like a challenge. So this is obviously a very competitive field right now. If everybody sees or starts to see this this opportunity. So we'll have to be, we'll have to be fast, we'll have to be precise. But I'm very much looking forward to that.

• 29:08Molly O'Shea?

  Are there a lot of companies spinning out of Nvidia in Europe right now?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Not that I'm aware of.

• 29:13Molly O'Shea?

  No?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:14Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, unicorn.

• 29:18Molly O'Shea?

  Awesome. So as we close out, I have to ask you one last question. It's the most difficult question. You can take time to think about it if you need to. But what is your hottest take right now?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Hottest take?

• 29:30Molly O'Shea?

  Could be that Europe is underrated. It could be that photonics are underrated. It could be like.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  I think both of these are true, actually. I think, yes, people are waking up to the the the the potential of photonics. But it is, uh, you know, it's just the start of a much larger um manufacturing ecosystem. That's going to exist. That's that's one. And yes, Europe is underrated. The innovation that has occurred here has not been commercialized in Europe. Whatever was good enough was either uh taken away to Taiwan or to the US. And so to to build it here, um, Europe has done this once. A long time ago, but it's been a forty year success story. And it's called ASML.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  And that's been incredible. And I think Europe is ready for for more stories like that. And and you know, that's it's underrated how ready Europe is ready for that.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  And I think for me that the hot take is if you look at a AI factory today, half of that is GPUs. But the other half is the technology to interconnect these GPUs. And there's a huge opportunity for optics, for photonics there. And we have to tap into that.

• 30:50Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Great place to end it. Well, Yannick Herwig, thank you so much for a nice little deep dive on photonics and FEMA.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 30:59Molly O'Shea?

  Cool. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zhone develops next generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zhone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. Today's episode is sponsored by V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets.

• 31:44Molly O'Shea?

  And it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over twenty five percent year over year. Public's AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S and P five hundred. So you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. And beyond Generated Assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped one percent match when you transfer your investments over from another platform.

• 32:29Molly O'Shea?

  If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery.

• 32:55Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.