0:09Hello everyone, welcome to Nebia's live coming to you from Berlin where the AI industry has gathered for NVIDIA GTC. We are live this time from Nebia's house just down the road from where Jensen Wong delivered his keynote only less than a few hours ago. There is a lot to unpack from an AI infrastructure. It is making headlines almost daily. You've got enormous investments, growing demand for compute, and you know, big questions about what comes next. We have got a great lineup of guests joining us to make sense of it all. Here's a look at
0:39just a few of them that are coming up.
0:40We've got Lara Sophie Boour from the tech translator, Andre Coreno from Nebus, Alex Banks from The Signal, and Kelly Kung, investor at a cell. Many more as well. It doesn't even stop there. We will be live again tomorrow from 10:00 a.m. Berlin time with another incredible lineup. We start though of course with reaction to Jensen Huang's keynote. Nvidia is at the center of the AI infrastructure boom. Billions pouring into new data centers. Demand for compute continues to grow. The industry really grappling with how to build
1:10capacity fast enough to keep up with demand. That was certainly a theme throughout the day. A lot of demand. So what did we actually learn from Jensen today? Uh here's a few of the key highlights. Nearly 10 billion dollars invested in Europe's AI ecosystem. New AI factory design cuts deployment from six months to just 14 days. Those containers that you might have seen um same AI output up to 30% less power.
1:37Nvidia also launched architecture to secure AI agents. Safety is something that Jensen talked about at length. Um incredibly important at this moment. So what does this all mean for the companies that are buying and deploying that compute? Joining me to break it all down is Nebia's chief revenue officer Mark Berditzki. Mark, hello. Welcome. Thanks for being here.
1:58Thanks for having me.
1:59Oh, Dra, it's a pleasure. And we're we are thrilled to be hosting you here at Nebia's house and this is the first time that we've had this kind of an opportunity. Nebia House is new in our overall execution and it's great to have you in this inaugural experience.
2:13Well, it's great if the viewers could kind of like see beyond me. There's this whole house and there's people working. It feels almost like like a hackathon house or something in San Francisco.
2:22It's like a popup Eastern European headquarters for us. And you're right. Actually, there's dozens of customers coming through all the time. Um, more interest and attention than I could have imagined when we put this idea together. And I think this is going to be a standard in our playbook going forward, right? Because this is the first GTC, right, in Berlin.
2:42This is and the first Nebas Nebia's house, which makes it makes a lot of sense. Um, so let's talk about the keynote. By the way, this is the postgame. This is great. I did the pregame, postgame. We're going to break it all down. Um, he covered a lot of ground in that keynote. I wonder what stuck out to you.
2:57Well, first of all, you got to thank um, Jensen. He brings extraordinary energy and focus on what's going on. He elevates the um, entire market's um, focus and attention on what we need to be doing next. And we could already feel it in the conversations I'm having with customers. Um, he's definitely brought everybody along. and he pointed out the fact that Europe's making big strides and we're seeing it as well in terms of the kinds of customers that we're winning that are building the future with models and next generation
3:26inference capabilities and um really thrilled about the early adoption that we're starting to see with industrial AI. Um Jensen focused on key industries like the the healthcare um highlights and the um manufacturing highlights and obviously he had a great time laying out what's going on with physical AI and robotics. Um, the robots. Yeah, the robots on very cute.
3:48I I think he brought it to a new level. I mean, he humanized in a interesting way.
3:53In a positive way. Yes.
3:54It's not as threatening when you're playing with a little robot on stage.
3:58Right. He brought he brought it back down. These were agent swarms. They were cute little ducks.
4:01Again, he may cute little ducks. But at the same time, I think he may have just sold 20 million of them.
4:07Oh, really? Well, he said right right away on stage, he said, "Get get on their their website, sign up now, and you know, this company of 10 people are going to get 20 million orders from everybody that's watching this streaming."
4:18I would rather one of those ducks than like a actual humanoid um at this point. But, you know, we were talking to some of the people and they said maybe 3 to 5 years before you have those humanoids actually in your house, which I thought was an like earlier than I expected.
4:31It's a you know, it's been an interesting promise. I mean, we've been watching it in popular movies for a long time. And we have the good fortune of working with um companies that are providing the engineering and um enabling technology uh that are building the models, but also building the robots. Um I think you're right that it's a couple years out. Um I for one wouldn't mind the help at home. I think my wife is looking forward to somebody else taking care of the laundry, right?
4:56Um but the reality is you're right, it's not tomorrow. We are seeing though fleets of robots in industrial applications. You know, you've we've all seen the videos of the Tesla robots and the Amazon automated uh warehouses, and I do think that more industry is looking for that, and we're hearing it as well from manufacturing customers and key industries.
5:16So, what do you think the thing your customers are going to be calling you about tomorrow? What do you think resonated with them? Or maybe you already know.
5:23Well, we already know because it's already happening. I mean, the conversations we having at Nebia's house, urgency, urgency. I think the the reality is people have been forecasting eventually supply will catch up with demand and that's just not happening happening and it seems like every one of these GTC's people are just reforcasting when that's going to happen and folks that have any kind of plans are realizing they need to be thinking now about how they're going to take care of those plans. So we're hearing from customers
5:50about what they need late in 27, early in 28. Um, and candidly, we're going to be in the same situation as everybody else, which is we don't have enough capacity to support them.
6:01And so, you guys are doing something very, very interesting. We talked about this before. I think you guys just made the official announcement. I have the website up myself because I'm just fascinated by this. Um, you have GPU, spot prices, and auction. Can you explain how that works?
6:16Certainly, really simply. Well, first off, let me add a little bit more context because I think you did a really good job with the leadin, but the reality is pricing in this market is opaque, right?
6:27Um, you have a lot of deals being done in order to be able to secure the capacity that people need and then vendors turning around and explaining what things are worth and there's no confirmation. You know, in some respects, it's sort of like debeers and diamonds. Oh, wow. It's what the buyer is willing to pay as opposed to what it's really worth. And Arotti has been very clear. We have to switch the paradigm from vendors picking customers to customers picking vendors. Return to
6:56a more transparent type of experience. And one of the critical factors that's missing is pricing. You know that sort of the beers diamond experience that needs to go away. We need to create a visible um recognition of reinforced value by the customer. So spot pricing is where a customer can get access to self-service um preemptable uh compute for short focused projects.
7:25So these are engineers that are willing to accept the fact that maybe the compute will turn off after a certain amount of time.
7:32They set a price range. As long as the algorithm driven price is inside their price range, they get access to compute. So effectively, we have a real- time priced recognition, probably me, a real-time demand-driven recognition of what price people are willing to pay. And you can see on our website now where those prices are going.
7:51It's it's pretty amazing. I'm looking at like a B200 up almost 80% in the last seven days. I I know it goes up and down and it's such an interesting idea because and Accardi was talking about this earlier today, but how sort of the history of Nebius allows you to do that. used to be, you know, Yandex and advertising and that has auctions. Do you think others in the industry can or will get on board with this kind of spot pricing and auction?
8:18There's a lot of curiosity out there. I can tell you from a lot of people.
8:21Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I can tell you a couple of hyperscalers actually asked us about our experiences. We had previously announced an auction that we had completed and actually we're doing auctions in addition to the spot pricing. And there's a recognition that the um opportunity to provide customers a more clear validated price is everybody's looking for it. So yes, we are getting a lot of interest and attention from across the board.
8:50Okay, that's interesting. Um so any other takeaways from his keynote? Um what like what do you what's next? Well, what I loved about the keynote was he actually also spent a fair amount of time about Veras and Vera Rubins are critical um to the industry. Right now, folks are um excited about the next generation compute. We're hearing it from we heard it mostly from model builders, but now we're also hearing it from the broader portion of the market.
9:17So, getting him getting Jensen to share, you know, what's valuable and why Veros are important was super helpful. Um, we have a gigawatt worth of virus coming next year and already have significant demand for them and it's great to be having Nvidia leading the way making sure that folks know that this is an important next step for all of them.
9:37Right. Well, it's been a pleasure getting your feedback and your insights on the keynote. I'm going to talk to you again tomorrow. Right.
9:42That's right, Dedra. I'm looking forward to it.
9:44Make sure the audience tunes right back in. This is a two-day postcape.
9:47That's right. That's right.
9:47Thank you to Mark Borderitzki. Now, while we've been breaking down Jensen's announcement here at Nebia's house, we also caught up with attendees outside of the keynote to get their first reactions. Here's what they had to say.
10:00They say, "My first time in GTC, ever say it's amazing."
10:05Jason speech is a fantastic speech.
10:08I really like the ending too because it said that it's all about Europe that it's we are all together.
10:14Very proud of Europe technology. I thought that we are more behind but really really impressed.
10:20Very very interesting for me especially for the robotics part uh part what they are developing together with agile robots.
10:29What excites me a lot is the physical AI the robotics. Um I think this guy have huge value. It was uh really awesome like seeing my products there like working at hugging face like I think they are quite huge.
10:42Number one key takeaway is that it's not difficult. So these are tools that anyone can use and uh and they are providing the infrastructure to make it easy to develop application to scale to enter in the physical world with AI.
10:56I really like the the introduction of the DXC super pod. So I'm very interested uh to see that in the digital twin and also play with it. when Jensen reflected on how far we've come and how far even in 2016 and 2019 he was talking about open AI and how you know he was he was giving 101 pedaflop of compute to open AI in 2019 and today you can get that same compute on like a laptop you
11:26know that you can fit in your backpack what Nvidia built with sandboxing is is really the future and I think it's really important to focus on security there's no dou doubt the AI going to be evaluated and continue growing and especially for the AI agentic and also I'm working on the AI infrastructure and require also the building more powerful uh interconnect between GPUs and GPUs.
11:54I'm very exciting that it's going to be very accessible and very easy to can put in practice like like the robot to can trying to put and help to others. For example, my father had cancer and the thing for radiotherapia, radiotherapy was very very for me was too much. Like I was very impressed and very glad that things like this going on. Yeah.
12:29Also watching from the keynote floor was Laura Sophie Boour. She spends much of her time translating complex technology into something that the rest of us can understand. She has built a large following doing just that. Uh Laura, thank you so much for coming straight over to Nebia's house. Um I was in the room as well. There was a lot of energy and this is your third GTC. Is that right?
12:50How did it compare to some of the others?
12:52Uh thanks Dave for having me here. Um well, it is different. Uh it has been a little smaller, more cozy, you know, in sweet Berlin here in Germany. I have been at in Paris at San Jose um now here and um but still doesn't doesn't mean need to be very big you know it's nice and intimate I thought it was very intimate um and I think that there is some you know people really want to get on track you know and I believe that Jensen is also a big
13:21believer in Germany as he knows that we have great talent and we have great industry knowledge and I think you need to now implement AI into industries and that's what he sees This is why we also need big players like Nvidia coming into the game and and I think there Germany has a great potential there.
13:39He highlighted a lot of the other big players in sort of the Nvidia ecosystem which was which was great to see. Um you explained this stuff for a living. So what is the version of the keynote you would you know tell your friends over dinner?
13:50Well I love that Jensen is pretty good also in in explaining technologies. He's always putting that into those are the this is the five layer cake of AI economy, you know, with compute and energy and AI uh factories and so on. Those are the the five things you need for a safe agent. And he's always breaking it down very well. Still, he's pretty, you know, um human, you know, while he's a genius.
14:16Um and then he's also bringing robots on stage all the time, you know. So, so in general I can tell that he believes and I believe that too that every company needs to become an AI company and the next stage is that we all need to integrate physical AI and that's where we are right now.
14:33Right. And what is your audience what were they hoping to see out of Jensen?
14:37What do you think like resonated with them?
14:39Well, as I'm a big believer in European technology companies, I was hoping and I hope my I think my community too for some optimism, you know, from him. Um, but I saw that and I could also tell from use cases he was demonstrating and there were I love to see like all those different companies from Europe there on stage like Telecom for example, like Semens, like SAP but also like um Agile Robots. he is now um investing $10
15:08billion in the European ecosystem and he's collaborating with plus 12K partners from here and that's what what I enjoy seeing because Europe belongs to the table and um is is as said pretty good in industry knowledge and for example with agile robots they are now also training 2,000 robots right in the heart of Europe in Munich right and uh there are great investments great partnerships coming to life you you know, he he was in Europe for a
15:37stint, I think a week or more, Berlin was obviously GTC, um, but he's been throughout sort of the continent and his message seems to be like, you're reach your potential, right? Um, do you get a sense from the companies you cover here, from the startups, um, that they're reaching their potential or are there bottlenecks, which has been a big theme today as well? Well, I think we are really on and we're so willing to be part of the global market and stage and
16:06I'm also working closely with wonderful companies here from Germany. For example, Neurobotics is also collaborating. They just build up their neuro gym also in Munich. So, they also start to train robots. Um, I have great hope for Germany and I believe Jansen too. I once asked him in in San Jose what he believes like what is the you know difference between Europe and and the US and the US of course they are like they're good in in software because
16:35they you need to ship it before it's ready and this is not how we work you know this is why we're good in industries we like to build everything step by step by step by step and then it's very safe but still we're not like like um making a big show out of it right so I believe that with the two of us we can be good partners because US has great software. We too, we also start to, you know, build great AI models from Black Forest Labs for example, Mistral AI. Um, but then we
17:04always need the industry knowledge. So it doesn't make sense to just have the models, just have the AI, it needs to go hand in hand.
17:10And so there was a whole section of his keynote devoted to physical AI where those things can go together. What was your takeaway? Um, progress on that front, challenges. So I believe that physical AI as we're coming from great industry knowledge also from the automotive industry can be a great chance for Germany um and we're on it to build um I believe that with physical AI you it's all about training those those robots
17:38because for example you know that if I you know grab the microphone right now and I can feel it I can hear it when it's falling down I can you know you can send everything and it's naturally but those robots need to learn it and so you need like both you need artificial environments to train them like on scale but then also real data and real environments and I think it's about that that we need to understand that robots uh uh learn from us and they need to
18:07learn everything we do naturally now right um for the very first time and it starts with very easy use cases like take something from A to B um and then um but also bring that into your homes bring that into the factories. Um, so I I believe like from AI companies to AI agents, we are now at the era of physical AI everyone everywhere around the world.
18:30Yeah, that was certainly his message as well. Laura, thank you so much for sitting down.
18:33Thank you so much, Dave.
18:35Thank you to Laura Sophie Boour. Uh, coming up, a closer look at the engineering behind the compute capacity rollout and what it takes to build and operate this infrastructure at scale. But first, across the show, we're going to be highlighting some of the AI companies building across Europe. Starting now with Cambrium, based right here in Berlin.
19:03We managed to design a new molecule and put it in the market in less than 24 months. That is absolutely insane. We're around my computer. We hit enter. We got a bunch of sequences of DNA. We ordered the DNA, put that into a strain, fermented that in 15,000 liter [music] tank, got tons of product, sold that in 24 months using AI. This is the pace we need to impose on modern science, modern R&D. Oh yeah, it's going to take 7 years to create a new molecule. No, it can
19:31take 24 [music] months if you do it properly. Most of the materials that we use on the day-to-day basis [music] are unsustainable. You probably have like a polyester jacket somewhere. You're probably using plastic foam shoes for your running. At Camri, we use AI to design the chemistry of tomorrow that will yield better materials for the future of the planet.
19:58You can see all the atoms flying around and towards the end they look like a real protein.
20:03Currently, I'm standing in our lab in the middle of Ma Berlin. We prototype everything here and everything that works out we send for scale up to finally roll out on hopefully the shelves of our customers later on. A lot of companies just focus on having AI make predictions. [music] What we do is we verify these predictions, create experiments and learn from these experiments to improve the quality of the AI. And that is what allows us to [music] design new proteins, new materials, new polymers in record time.
20:32And for that Nus was quite empowering because [music] it reduced the friction between idea and execution.
20:38If we go fast then maybe we can actually launch [music] for incos next year.
20:42When you have a happy commercial team [laughter] just since we've started using Nebus there's been a notable increase [music] in performance but also the time it takes to get to the answers that we want. So we have these protein design campaigns [music] where we uh design tens of thousands of proteins and then we filter them to see which ones have the best traits. And to build this pipeline, you need several [music] models, right? You need some sort of structural design model at the start, some sort of sequence design, a folding, and then you need a comparison of all of them. And [music] what we did by employing the NIMS provided by Nvidia on
21:11Nebius's platform [music] is we basically managed to speed up this process four-fold. So what would usually take us 2 to 3 weeks, we could get done within a week. And they understood that I was a scientist first and an [music] engineer second. They offered a lot of support. And this really, really made the process much easier.
21:27We're in a part of the lab where we do next generation sequencing. So this is where we can once we have engineered our microbes uh sequence their genome and understand what these edits that we're trying to introduce have actually achieved. Is the gene in the right location? Do we have any mutations? Is the strain what we think it is. And once you understand what features are important, you can start building them into your models to be able to get better results down the line.
21:51We use the [music] phrase, we're sort of repeating the work of evolution, but we're speeding up. We don't have time to deal with like EC2 scheduling and so on. We don't have time for infrastructure. We need to do [music] science if we actually want to change the world the way we want to.
22:05It's not an easy field. It's not a simple task that we're trying to solve.
22:10I think there's a lot of like startup magic happening at Cambriam. We all have to wear several hats and I think the general energy of like can do attitude. Let's just like solve every problem is what it is to work at Cambrian. Welcome back to Nebius Live. We have talked a lot about the scale of investment going into AI infrastructure.
22:44But as the industry races to add capacity, the engineering challenges, they're becoming just as important as access to capital and power and GPUs. AI data centers. They are fundamentally different from traditional facilities.
22:56We're talking about increasingly dense computing systems, enormous power and cooling requirements, networks that are connecting tens of thousands of GPUs, and increasingly the economics of AI infrastructure depend on getting all of those systems to work together efficiently. To explore that, I'm joined by Jeremy Allejo, managing director at semi analysis, and Andre Coreno, chief infrastructure and product officer at Nebas. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for being here.
23:24Thanks for having me.
23:25Um, Andre, let me start with you because I think Mark brought this up at the very top of the live stream. Speed is of the utmost important on, you know, so many different levels. What is Nebius's move to go quickly? What does that look like in practice?
23:40Well, probably the most important part is that we as a team, as a company already done that, went through that curve. So we know how the result the good result looks like feels like u how the execution good and bad yeah feels and u so it's a slightly different technology but the same idea the same priorities the same um the same set of people basically um and we have this experience
24:09u the next I would highlight um that building the basic infrastructure is the highest priority for the company. That's where a lot of our efforts and priorities just goes. Uh we just all in on it. Um and probably the also we are very open to the different solutions. So there there was a technology shift, there are some
24:38technology shifts uh coming on. So we do not just replicate and build whatever we used to do or what the market is used to to build and to execute. So no we are very open to the like pretty uh different approaches to how we deliver the capacity.
24:56So if you see a different approach you'll pivot or you'll remain agile to be able to move with it. You won't like absolutely these days you don't you almost never replicate what you've done yesterday. It's like the AI moves too fast also.
25:10Yes. It's the every single project is uh much different from your previous one.
25:16Even if the gap between those start of those projects is like a quarter, it's already different. And you know some of the stuff that Jensen Hang showed on stage, right? He showed the Ver Rub and he showed like the actual hardware of it and then he showed that massive container, right Jeremy? You know we hear news all the time of these huge new AI sites or data centers. Um we can't build them fast enough because we are supply constrained. Um what did you think about the keynote? Right. He talked about DSX as kind of a solution
25:46almost like containerized data centers that you can drop in that reduces that time to build and get online I guess.
25:53Yeah. Um look there's [clears throat] different things. Um DSX I would say is extremely helpful for the whole ecosystem. uh because what we've seen since the beginning of the AI wave is just a huge wave of new entrance right new data center developers uh new neo clouds and obviously having this sort of centralized blueprint uh produced by Nvidia uh which has the full system view on like what needs to be done the cooling at the power level and so on and so forth that helps everyone building AI infrastructure so I think it's a great strategic move by Nvidia to make sure
26:22that everyone is just overall better at building AI infra obviously you have companies that like Nabius are much bigger have a lot of engineers can take on more them themselves. And there's other companies that are newer to the space still have certain um assets like maybe they have a great site with power and so on and so forth. Maybe they have a great technical teams access to capital but maybe they lack the data center expertise and that's where DSX is and that's where you would want to use DSX but it's not for everyone. Is that right do you think?
26:48Um [snorts] I I think it's a it's um it's a blueprint that uh shows how to do things but there's still some amount of flexibility. It's not like DSX is this one thing. And for example, you talked about container data centers. Yeah, that's that's one way to sort of build facilities, but there's there's obviously many other ways. These container data centers can be extremely fast to deploy. Uh they can have some drawbacks as well. Uh some companies, especially for example, hypers skitters, they want to build for fungibility. They want to be able to have, you know, GPUs, uh CPUs, maybe TPUs or trainiums, all
27:17different kind of chips. Um and so they're going to have different types of designs that some of these containerized solutions may not be the best. And so the containerized solution, Andre, it makes, you know, the lead time a little bit shorter to get the data center online. I think it was something like four months down to just two weeks or something like that. Um, but you know, this is something I asked Jensen as well. You can have the data centers there, but you need the power to actually power them. And I know that Nebia joined an early trial of Nvidia DSX Flex, um, which looked at that exact
27:47problem. Let's AI clusters adjust their power use and response to the grid. Um, how does that work? And you know what has it enabled you guys to do in terms of speed?
27:57Well, again I'll refer to the history back in the days like a couple of decades ago when the uh previous uh wave started uh we and like everyone was building for the certain money and with the the project took two three years going forward like 15 years the the cost of the buildout was like 30% of the initial ones and you could do it in 12 months. for eight months instead of two or three years. So that's kind of how
28:25the previous technology evolved.
28:28Uh but that was a very gradual growth.
28:32Now with the with the with the AI stuff, you have to scale so much. You don't have that time, right?
28:38Um uh to basically optimize everything yourself and to go efficiency. So the ecosystem itself it includes Nvidia, us, our colleagues, uh, vendors and the design companies, everyone they have to share this information, to share the approach, to get all the SKUs, to get all the production again to get to the more optimal and more effective scale faster, much faster because the investments are bigger, you need it
29:08faster, everything has scaled from capital to the data centers. that that is the biggest uh value basically of like getting everyone together saying like this is the blueprint this is how it can be done this is and this gets to everyone and then everyone can take it and just evolve uh on top of that right um now Jeremy semi analysis has sort of a big number that it's predicting for you know gigawatts coming online what is it 43 uh 50 gawatt
29:3750 gawatts okay added in one year in 2027 which is just a wild excluding China by the way.
29:42Excluding China. Um how does how is that possible? What do you think the biggest bottleneck is? What could stop us from reaching that?
29:51Um there's uh plenty of bottlenecks of course across the whole stack. Um if you talk to people building data centers, they will tell you labor is a big struggle. Uh maybe workers aren't showing up. Uh maybe they're getting other offers elsewhere at much higher prices. Maybe the cost is is going up continuously. um supply chains. All of these OEMs, you know, the vertives, the Schneiders of the world, they have to expand capacity tremendously. Um capital has been a major issue as well. Um and capital has actually been, I would argue, probably one of the key reasons
30:20why 27 is going to be such an acceleration versus 26 or 25. Uh it's because since uh mid middle of 2025, rough roughly speaking, we've seen materially more capital being deployed in the space. Uh one of the indicators we track is like lease contracts. you know, Microsoft signing with QTS for QTS to build a data center for them. Um, these lease contracts have we we track $1.3 trillion of lease contracts signed year to date in 2026 [laughter] when 24 was like 200 billion, right? No, I'm I'm wondering like where
30:48does this capital come from? We've already seen hyperscalers, many of the, you know, safest um best fortress cash balance sheets um possible, you know, dip into debt financing. How do we find all that capital for next year? Well, I mean if you look at for example Micros if you assume like the the the debt for a data center release is like let's say six and a half% for Microsoft exposure and then uh until a few weeks ago or a few months ago the the 10-year risk-free rate in the US was you know four and a half%. Then you get like a pretty nice
31:18spread for AAA rated company which is higher than the US government, right?
31:22But it was pretty attractive. Now obviously since the last few months the risk-free rate has moved up, spreads have moved out a bit which is a consequence of hey maybe the the money that threw [clears throat] all of this capital first. Uh maybe that's starting to be a bit tapped out and so you just need to increase a bit the interest rate to enable more folks to come in.
31:39However, when you talk to um all of the data center builders in the space, they will still tell you that hypers scale uptake is actually fine. people are still very much willing to deploy capital for a hypers scale uptake a 20-year contract for example with a 3% escalator on Microsoft what is most struggling these days to finance is uh AI labs for example open AI anthropic signing a 5-year contract or think about all they also need to tap a lot of capital in public markets probably right yeah yeah and I think it's it's there
32:06was um over too much enthusiasm perhaps where folks thought thought like hey I got a 20 billion dollar contract from openai it's going to be more than enough to like make uh I get funding at you know 90% loan to cost. I think that was uh kind of delusional to assume this could carry the build out. They're not investment grade. Um OpenAI is not yet profitable. Anthropic is um and they have massive compute commitments. So obviously what's happening is interest rates are moving up. People are asking them to do maybe higher prepayments, maybe get some back stuff from the
32:36chipmakers. And what is interesting is the chipmakers, they're making so much money of selling the chips that it actually makes sense for them to provide maybe, you know, 510 billion uh credit support per gigawatt if they're going to sell $30 billion per gig, right? That which is kind of what we we've seen in the space. Um Andre, sort of just very quickly to you, what is the biggest bottleneck in your opinion to building data centers?
32:57Um like Jeremy said, all of that.
33:00All of it. All of the above. [laughter] Yeah. No, if you had to choose one, it's it's it's not also the bottleneck.
33:06you have a moving target. So every single day you want to do it faster and and more and more. So it's like when you're dealing with a uh moving target, you basically will always have almost everything bottleneck is if everything is bottlenecked, then you're in a good position means you are not like being strangled by something specific.
33:25I actually think that sums it up. So great answer. Um thank you guys so much Jeremy from semi analysis and Andre from Nebas. Thanks guys.
33:33Thank you. Still to come, we are turning to physical AI and the growing effort to bring AI out of the data center and into the real world. We will be joined by Nebius's head of physical AI and the co-founder and CTO of Sarak. For now, here's another look at the AI companies building across Europe. Here's Roda AI. There's this clear gap between imagination of the technology world and reality.
34:05There had been decades of these cool demos of robots doing bath clips or humanoids carrying items around, but at the same time, you know, no one has a humanoid in their house. No one is running humanoids in their factories.
34:18No one had an AI model that was good enough to where the robot can operate in the real world. One of the things set Nebus apart from other cloud providers is [music] actually how much they care about our success. From the onset of the company, we identified that the biggest problem in robotics is a data problem.
34:42The way that robot models are conventionally trained is [music] it's actually kind of surprising. They're they're typically trained by someone standing behind a robot and and teleoperating it. So essentially puppeteering the robot and doing that for [music] thousands and thousands of hours. And then the robot learns from that data and kind of imitates what it learned from that data. Problem with that is that as soon as you then take that robot and put it in a new environment, it no longer has the data to know how to operate in that environment. And so you you end up with these very brittle policies that just
35:11practically don't work in the real world. [music] And humans don't need this kind of data. And they learn very accurately how to manipulate the world. [music] We felt like there should be a way to be able to do this if we can construct our models in the correct way.
35:24We view data as sort of a pyramid. Um where the width of the pyramid describes how available that data is and and how how much of that data there is. The height of the pyramid describes how close it is to the direct data that you would collect from a robot. And our team's insight was that you're never going to solve a problem as challenging as robotics by trying to collect your own data. There's only one data set that even comes close to that and that's
35:52internet scale video. We can extract the intelligence about the physical world from [music] video data. Uh and we can use that intelligence to then teach robots to do tasks that were previously believed to be impossible to automate.
36:05NBI has helped us double our compute capacity at a really critical inflection point for the company. To train these types of models, you need a [music] lot of compute, but it's not just quantity of compute. The first is the reliability of nodes. The second thing is uh how they're interconnected. And something that stood out to us about Nibbius was when we ran tests, we found that the reliability of the chips was actually [music] very high.
36:25We leverage managed Kubernetes slurm for being able to access these [music] resources, utilize them for training our models.
36:32Resulted in a cluster that we can train very large models on with pretty high levels of reliability and really enable us to kind of [music] not worry about the compute infrastructure and worry about ultimate performance on our robot. What was really great about our partnership with Nibbius is that even though they didn't necessarily have in their road map plans to put pabytes of data right next [music] to our compute cluster, they actually did the work to build that uh storage on the cluster for [music] us so that we could then use it to train our
37:00models. One of the things that to me has set Nebus apart from other cloud providers is actually how much they care about [music] our success. Nebus has the strong desire to maintain it so that we [music] are successful. Every time we work with a real customer is really fun because you learn about what it actually takes to deploy a robot.
37:22We want the robots who are developing here to ship to real customers and have a real impact.
37:27AI is really going to be able to enable humans to focus on the things that they derive value from.
37:35My my real hope and and something that we care deeply about at ROA is that robots are used to enhance people's lives. Physical AI is one of the big themes here at GTC this week and we are starting to see the technology move beyond research labs and demonstrations into real world applications particularly in robotics. Joining me to discuss this next phase are Mark Tusher, co-founder and CTO of Seract and Evan Helda, head of physical AI Nebius.
38:18Welcome to you both. We were just having this conversation. We got to the bottom of the ducks at the end of the keynote. They were the hugging face ducks and give us give us a little context behind that.
38:29Like what do they do and why why did Jensen bring them out?
38:32So I think it's just like some fun robots everyone can use in their like in their show.
38:39Yes. Exactly. I I also ordered a couple of them.
38:42And what do they do? Just whatever.
38:44They haven't arrived yet around.
38:46Yeah. They they walk around and and clean clean the house.
38:49They're cute and they're autonomous.
38:50They were very cute.
38:51I think it's a way to try to just inspire people and get builders hands on keyboard. It's an open source platform, right, that they're building to help train robots. So, it's a way just to educate people on what's possible, right? And so much of like the robotics race has been these demos that are really amazing and like capture imagination. But Mark, give me like the boring version of this. What happens when you get robots to do the same job all day?
39:12I think like when it comes from to demos like from demos to deployment, I think the the boring version of it is that in deployment robots have to be super reliable, right?
39:25Super accurate and quite fast. So, and also like the customer often doesn't really care how we make it happen. So we are like we love our new like world action models, vision language action models, but the customer in the end doesn't care. They care about KPIs. I think that's the boring version of it.
39:45And at the same time, we have to make sure because with physical AI these days, like what the models brought us is capabilities that were unimaginable five years ago.
39:55For me as a roboticist, I'm I'm doing robotics for the last 12 years. And 10 years ago, I I couldn't have imagined that we were we will end up here.
40:05What about you, uh, Evan? Are you surprised by some of the breakthroughs that we have, you know, robots and industrials, humanoids? Talk a little bit about what it takes to actually put those out there, too, on the Nebia side.
40:15Yeah, I think people are being surprised every week. I mean, just recently, you had the Astra model from OpenAI come out that was in everyone's mind an LLM and all of a sudden it has like VLA model type capabilities. I think there's these emerging properties that are coming from the bitter lesson, right? More data, more compute, and amazing things are are happening. And so, yeah, I think we're seeing models that can reason across tasks, models that can reason across
40:40form factors. And um it makes if I'm building a robot, it begs a lot of questions about where value is going to be captured and if I should train my own model, if I should just use offtheshelf models, if I should bet on getting the hardware right.
40:54Um, and so a lot of open questions. if you're someone like C React, but um for us, we're we're here to try to help um really accelerate every stage of that learning loop across all kinds of different embodiment, right? And so for a robot to work, when you talk about safety and all these things, you have to have the right models behind it. You need the compute power behind that. How comput intensive is it to run these robots?
41:16I think it's it's quite computensive like uh first of all, [clears throat] training a new task, training a new use case always like requires training. Give me a few of those use cases.
41:27Like we currently do return handling in uh like warehouses.
41:32Meaning we process returns people like goods people send back.
41:37Which means it's robots doing it.
41:39Yeah. It's our robots doing it. You have to unpack it, unfold it, inspect it. like an AI model inspects the the thing and then decides whether we can restock it or we have to send it to like to a checking or quality assurance uh unit. So, and then we fold it again, put it into a bag and then we send Oh, so it's like dextrous. It's actually folding as well.
42:04Like first like opening and then unfolding, inspecting it, then folding it again and then uh putting it into the back.
42:12Are these mechanical hands? Then it's not a full humanoid. It's kind Does it look like fingers too?
42:17It's it it has uh finger grippers like two finger grippers.
42:20And uh it's a stationary dual arm system, right? Um what's something that's easy for a person but still surprisingly hard for these robots?
42:28I think actually the the whole task is is quite easy for a human. You can learn pretty quickly.
42:34But like it has so much like variety that you know a t-shirt could be folded differently. Someone could have packed, you know, there's many many ways.
42:44There's so many. Yeah. And someone could have packed something totally different and a human would recognize easily.
42:51And uh it's it's it's quite hard for a Roman robot to manipulate the things, right?
42:57On the other hand, recognizing stains, recognizing damage, and so on is much faster and much more accurate than a human could, right? So there's sort of like give and take a little bit of that. Um, Evan, what are robotics teams having to build themselves that should be easier by now?
43:13Everything [laughter] there. A lot of them have really talented technologists and builders. So, you see a lot of them go out there and they have a mindset. They're confident they can build uh a lot of the backend elements themselves.
43:26What we do see though is a lot of them end up spending a lot of time toing with infrastructure and and the cloud when a lot of that time could be spent on the actual learning part and actual setting up the experiments and doing the research. And so um that's our big focus is how do we abstract away a lot of that um infrastructure um orchestration work uh the pipeline um staging and we're finding ways now to actually build out frameworks allow
43:54agents to do that for them and so we can get into that if you if you want to interesting things we we're launching here. Yeah sure. Um well Mark Mark mentioned the KPI for the end user and you know the main KPI we're seeing tell me if this is wrong but I think the main KPI for you is iteration speed.
44:10Like how many times can you get through a learning loop and into that next training run based upon the real data you're collecting and the failure modes you're seeing. Is that is that I think that's that's like that that's a KPI we are tracking. Yes.
44:22Yeah. If we can increase that speed like we will be fast. If I'm applying that to your example, it's like it took x amount of hours to get the robot to fold the clothes a certain way, a shirt a certain way to fold a pair of pants that it should take less iterations, should learn that new task faster. Is that how that works?
44:39So the iteration speed we're talking about is upstream of that where there's numerous steps that go into a training run or a learning loop is what you'll hear about, right? So they have a robot in the wild. It's collecting real world data. There's now all these steps to go and take that data, curate it, process it, and find the failure modes and then get it ready for training. And then there's the next stage of training.
45:01Then you got to take that new model that came out and you got to do eval evaluations. Does it do what we think it's going to do? You can put it in sim simulation. You can put it in the real world. That's its own pipeline and workflow. Then you got to deploy it and you got to do it all over again.
45:14And what we're seeing is that there's all these different tools each of those stages.
45:18Yeah. And those should be a more connected workflow, a more connected pipeline, a little more automated pipeline. But today it's it's not right. There's a lot of glue code either right between tools. The tools can talk to each other. There's different cloud environments sometimes between them.
45:32There's the edge environment. And so the question is how do we create more of a single pane of glass where we can orchestrate those different tools and cloud environments. It's more one uniform pipeline. And fortunately, we now have agents that are really good at a lot of the engineering work that does the glue code, that does the infrastructure provisioning. So, what we've launched here is what we call the physical AI workbench. It's part control plane for physical AI, meaning it's a pane of glass to go in and procure
46:00infrastructure, but it's also part agentic harness.
46:03Right. And you think about what a harness is. It gives agents the ability to be effective in the world. To do that, you need access to infrastructure. You need shared context across the tools and stages and you need access to tools.
46:18So what we're doing is we're taking all that and packaging into a framework and allowing customers to point an agent at it and use language to say, "Hey, build me a workflow with these steps, these tools, these GPUs, run it for this amount of time, and boom, it just goes."
46:31And so it takes it goes from what would take days, if not weeks, to build out one full pipeline down to hours. And so we're working with Creact on this and they actually told us that it's been saving you 40% of engineering time just to build out workflows and pipelines. So that's a pretty huge leap and that's what creates the iteration speed and that's a lot on the back end. I mean now I understand why you said everything out the sexy stuff just like to get to that point of a robot folding a shirt.
46:57Um, let me ask you guys maybe a little bit of a broader question that fits into, you know, Jensen Wong's tour through Europe and some of the stuff he's been saying like we are sitting here in Germany with all of this industrial expertise around us. What is is there anything missing to turn that into even more successful robotics companies or do you think that you know Germany is already on its way? So I think there there could be a lot more like robotics companies if they would
47:26take a bit more risk because I feel like like automation and robotics will change massively because before we had we had to write a lot of code for like systems that are were basically state machines. Whenever you had an error you had to write some code that fixes that error.
47:45Now one model call has replaced all of that and I think that was that was quite impressive and that was the change and so you could potentially automate everything right and I think like if we would use the industrial network we have in Germany or like in the D region I think many especially industrial facilities have a lot of automation already which facilitates like an easier entry if you don't have to walk around and and and
48:14and get stuff out of shelves, but you can get it from a conveyor. That's already an easier entry for a for a new kind of robotic system.
48:22So, is the idea you need to embrace it more?
48:25Evan, what do you think? Same question to you.
48:30Yeah, I think it is a mindset thing and it's it's a philosophy thing and I think people in Germany, leaders in Germany need to realize like they have this amazing platform upon which to go innovate on. and they have all the data in all the factories. Um, all the expertise and the the knowledge on how to do these things. Um, that knowledge is leaving the workforce pretty soon.
48:55Um, and so they needed just to prioritize capturing those workflows, capturing that knowledge and taking risks with how that data can move. Right now there's a lot of like rules, regulations around where the data can go and it does slow things down. So maybe loosen things up a little bit. um make it easier to get access to data. Make it easier to run it in certain locations and just run more experiments like don't don't plan the experiment don't meet have meetings about the experiment just just go do the experiments and and
49:24iterate faster and yeah take a page out of people like Elon Musk book like I I read not I read recently the spa a NASA engineer went to SpaceX and they said that the reason SpaceX is SpaceX is because they just run the experiments and they don't have meetings about it they just go do it. So, I think that's the that's the key.
49:39I mean, you know, I'm based in San Francisco and that's like what I see so much from the companies. What do they say? Um, building a company is like building a is flying a plane while you're building it, which is certainly sort of the attitude over there. Um, so it's interesting that you say maybe Germany needs a little bit more of that. Um, thank you both so much Mark and Evan. Really enjoyed that conversation.
50:00Yeah, us too. Thank you so much.
50:03Thanks to Mark and Evan. We will come back to physical AI later in the show looking at how advances in AI generated video could help robots better understand the world around them. Zev Farbman from LTX and Lucas Ziggler from Botnanza will join for that. And for now, let's take a quick look at what's been happening here in Berlin. It has been a busy week for Nebius. Heat. [music]
50:46[music] Hey, heat. Hey, heat. [music] [music]
51:17We've talked a lot today about the huge buildout of computing infrastructure, but there is an important distinction between owning a data center, operating creating an AI cloud and actually delivering AI as a service. And increasingly, the companies that are building infrastructure are doing all three of them. Joining me to talk about how Nebius fits into this changing market and how AI companies reach their audience is Lindsay Irvine, the company's chief marketing officer.
51:42Thank you. It's good to be here.
51:44It's great to be here. Um, so throughout the day, I've heard everything. I've heard data centers. I've heard cloud service providers. I've heard token factories, AI factories, kind of break down what the difference is and where Nebius fits into this.
51:58Yeah. So, I I I think I would say let's zoom out from the piece parts and start with the opportunity, which is as companies, as builders are building for different use cases, different workloads, apps, models, what have you, they need compute. They need the plumbing, retrieval, observ um observability, all of the components that let them access that compute. They need inference and then they need model access. And I think Nebius's opportunity and what we're building is to be that AI
52:26cloud for the for the developers and for the builders of today. And so we see the opportunity both as providing and owning kind of the bottom layer of that stack, the compute from dirt and soil all the way through. We kind of design and build all of that ourselves. Um and then on top of that, it's all the software layers that actually allow customers to get to the application and the outcome.
52:47And so it's optimizing that end to end, right? And so software applications that is really a key part of it. And as I've been talking to your colleagues, other executives at Nebius, that has been extremely clear from sitting here. Um I think that that's been a theme today as well. Not all cloud providers are equal.
53:04What are customers coming to Nebulas for? What kind of applications?
53:08Well, we laugh. We say the first thing is do you have GPUs? Right. I think I think everybody at a very basic level, you know, the world is compute constrainted, right? And so I think um we've earned a reputation to be you know we believe the best but if not one of the best in terms of providing reliable compute um at massive scale. So I think that is the first thing customers come to us for and we can provide that uh and we're growing that rapidly. But then the second thing is well there's all of these different and piece parts that the builders themselves have to actually add
53:37on to get to that end application. And I think increasingly it's like can you just manage that complexity for me? Can you do the physical infrastructure side and also the software side so I can focus on my model I can focus on my post-training my model with my own data to get to my outcome my har my harness or my application and so increasingly what we want to be able to say is yes we can do you know kind of top to bottom and really be that full stack AI cloud for you. I was just hearing about that from Mark, right? Just even in the
54:06physical AI world, there are so many steps on the back end and he was saying essentially Nebius gives, you know, all the tools to a robotics company to be able to focus on the thing that they do, the end product. Um, on that note, Lindsay, I I like this line of yours.
54:21You say models don't build anything, builders do. Who's the builder you have in mind when you say that?
54:26I mean, we've been meeting them all around here. It's very cool. So, I would say it's the builder at the physical AI company. It's the builder at the life sciences company. It's the builder in capital markets at a financial services company. Um AI natives to large enterprises. Everyone is looking to build with AI, transform with AI. And so I think the opportunity for builders is no no longer just like what's access to the latest and greatest model. It's how do I build a system, right? How do I think from compute to again all of the
54:55plumbing components to inference to model to harness? How do I actually build a system? And importantly, how do I focus on my end application without having to worry about all of the downstream implications? And as we go from experimentation to production scale AI, the complexity increases because it's not just now how do I turn the model into a thing. It's how do I make that thing operate at scale cost-effectively, reliably, and efficiently. And that's where we can show up as a partner to these builders.
55:25Um and so actually just yesterday um we announced um or earlier this week we announced kind of the extension of our AI builder program uh for Europe specifically where we've come with compute so 10 million in compute grants um we've come to with access to capital for kind of these builders that want to then scale out and turn their idea into a company access to venture capital and then community right these builders are help me meet with people and build and hack and experiment and then as I grow and scale turn my idea into something
55:54and so we're really looking to build community around that. Something else that you guys just announced which I think is kind of brilliant. Brings transparency to the space is um the spot pricing for tokens for models the auction. I mean from a marketing point of view this just feels so interesting and like have you had feedback on that?
56:13So I always go back to the premise of like what does the customer care about right? What is the customer telling us?
56:17Where is the demand? Where are the pain points? Um and increasingly there is an appetite that you know give us give me transparent ondemand access and of course there are those customers that also want more of the certainty you know of multi-year kind of contracts and access to consu you can get both but so that we're trying to provide both we're trying to be the provider that provides both the certainty right for reserve but also an open marketplace where consumers and customers can set the price
56:44please do agile you and I both are based in San Francisco So we know like you know we're hearing all the time about adoption of AI tools but it does strike me especially when I get out of that bubble um that there's a lot of industries and companies non- tech non AI that are adopting this at a slower pace. Is anything about and some of the customers you've met here anything surprising industries that you think are accelerating really quickly or have momentum right now? I always find it fascinating when I talk to people in the physical AI space and just the the
57:14certainty that that is going to be such a major future for all of us and that can touch so many different industries. it can touch so many different it really is a horizontal as opposed to a vertical uh and I think coming to Europe you see that very much um in terms of the opportunity and I think increas I mean there's big discussion of like when will the enterprise adopt so not just within a vertical but how are we seeing you know enterprises be adopting AI and you know enterprises are typically laggered they don't need to be at the bleeding edge but I think increasingly we are um
57:43starting to see more and more seeds of opportunity where you know leading digital natives through to the enterprise are leaning in and looking for those use cases to really prove the value of AI and frankly launch new products.
57:56And yet we are still so early.
57:58We're still so early.
57:59Exactly. You took the words out of my mouth. Lindsay Irvine, thank you so much for being to be here. Thanks.
58:04Shortly the founder and writer of The Signal, Alex Banks. He will join me on set with the CTO of Nebus and the CTO of Distill Labs. Before that we do that, yesterday I sat down with Mile CEO Arthur Mench. his company. Of course, it was one of the early pioneers of open AAI models, but the company has evolved well beyond that. It is now moving further down the infrastructure stack, building out its own compute capacity and offering it to customers. So, I asked Arthur whether Mistra is constrained by access to compute and also about the appeal of open models to
58:33enterprise customers across Europe. We don't have enough comput now, but we have plenty of compute coming uh online in 2027 2028. And so we're very happy about the ramp up that we've managed to finance and to set up. The demand is is tremendous in particular in Europe. So while it may be true that there may be a little bit of over supply at some point in the US, uh it's not the case outside.
59:00Enterprises realize that AI is going to be about business continuity. uh as they replace some of their processes with AI systems, they want to make sure that they can change their providers. Uh they can change the infrastructure it runs on. Uh they can negotiate prices and so that means that using open source technology sitting on that is portable across multiple infrastructure is is a great asset for them. They're also looking at uh control over their IP as something super important. uh because uh
59:29when you you have critical IP on industry and engineering for instance there is no way in which you bring it to companies that may want to intermediate you. uh so they want to build their own AI systems and the best way to build their own AI system is to use and modify open source technology and then finally cost is starting to be an issue in that all these things generate a lot of tokens and so the sensitivity to cost means that as an enterprise decision maker there there is no reason why you
59:58should go and pay for an IP margin where you can go and access open source models that are uh devoid of IP margin uh and So just from a cost arbitrage perspective, it's bringing a lot of companies to use open source models. Now they've used a lot of Chinese open source models because for a while they they were the best. What we are seeing now is that now that we're the best in multiple domains, uh we're getting a lot of traction there. We're also pretty convinced that from a security point of view and a safety point of view, it's
1:00:27much better for enterprises to rely on western open source models and we're very happy to be leading that front.
1:00:45Arthur Mench there, CEO of Mistral. In his comments, I get it's something that we're seeing across the industry, the open model race. It's not just about who builds the best model anymore. It's increasingly about who can make those models useful, accessible, and economical for businesses. Joining me to discuss where this race goes. Next are Alex Banks, founder and writer of The Signal, Denila, CTO of Nebius, and Yakobioski.
1:01:11I I try. How did I do?
1:01:14Very well. Last name. Excellent. First name Yatk. So very close.
1:01:19Yas. Okay, guys. I'm sorry, but welcome.
1:01:21Welcome. I'm thrilled regardless for you guys to be here. Um, Alex, open models. they are a topic that is very you know dear to me. I I love reporting on it. I was early you know in the deepseek days. Um what has changed like this year has been a big year for open source models at least in the US. Has it been the same way in Europe and tell me sort of what that's led to?
1:01:43Yeah you know obviously like Black Forest Labs and the rest you know all sort of coming through and producing some really sort of tier one models. I think you know as a as a whole the industry has just moved on so much. I think when we think about the sort of closing the gap from the frontier with you know open models on one hand the frontier on the other that gap is just getting so much closer and it's very very exciting because it means that the opportunities to use these open models you know from a price perspective but also you know latency speed all of these things now mean that they are the
1:02:13utility that they hold is just incredible. I mean, you know, recent numbers from Versel's AI gateway, you know, when when we think about open o open models themselves, right? They're taking up seven in 10 tokens, but they account for only less than 25% of the spend. So, they're really moving the needle in terms of usage, but in terms of, you know, the cost, it's all of that's coming down. So, I think it's absolutely incredible.
1:02:33Right. So, they're efficient, they're good enough. There's always the saying, I hear it all the time, you don't need to take a Ferrari to the grocery store, right? You find a model that is good enough. Um, you know, I wonder how have you seen this play out this year? And do open models like eventually overtake the Frontier Lips? Do you need We've talked a lot today about having many models at certain companies. So, how do you decide what that mix is?
1:02:56No, I I'm not sure they will ever overtake because uh like Frontier Intelligence is still a function of amount like of dollars invested, right?
1:03:04And Frontier Labs like OpenAI and Entropic are way ahead of anyone in the world right now. But they are catching up and catching up is way easier. And the Ferrari to the grocery store metaphor is exactly right because for a lot of use cases there are not this open-ended uh tasks that you don't know what the result will be like engineering style a lot of like modern [snorts] AI and we see that all the time we see that a lot amongst our customers for example
1:03:32they're used in a very scope domains right narrow problems we need to solve this but we need to solve it at scale for example this is where your open source models open models come into life. And it's not just Frontier models.
1:03:45There's also smaller scale models like the Flash versions that have been released recently are absolutely stunning. They're like uh they're very small, they're very fast, they're very efficient and still can solve a lot of tasks. So I'm super happy. And so you're happy with it. And and there's fine-tuned models, right? I actually spent a lot of time talking about this earlier today. That's what sort of openweight models allow you to do is be very specialized at something which is what Distill Labs does, right? Yassic.
1:04:12Yeah. And I I I think that ultimately you'll have tasks where you need the top top tier intelligence and it's really hard to improve on that. But for everything else, you kind of you don't really have the model that you need because the big ones are too expensive and the small ones while they're good, they're sometimes just not good enough.
1:04:29And the only way to kind of you you need you need kind of the best out of models, right? uh which is pretty much your custom models when you're going to have it frontier intelligence but in a very small form factor of of a fine tuned model you pretty much take sorry small model you take a small model you supervised finetune it you do RL on it and then it be and catches up to the frontier level intelligence but it doesn't grow in size it stays the same obviously there's no free lunch right it's only specialized it's only good at what you do but I think if you know what
1:04:58you're doing you have some you know you have some runs already done your project is relatively stable. I really think that's how you squeeze out all of the performance from your inference stock, right? And it felt like the first few years of this generative AI cycle, it was about benchmark maxing, right? And the industry and companies have come around and said, "Okay, maybe we actually the the model that does the best on the benchmark isn't actually the best for my company." That's sort of what you're getting at, right? Has enterprise moved away from that? So I I
1:05:28think enterprises just from at least what I'm seeing they're they know what they want to do and they don't really care about like the benchmarking and the benchmarks these days are about long horizon agent a agentic tasks right and like Danil is like I no I mean but he sometimes feels that there are too many benchmarks already benchmarks become specialized right like you have fintech benchmarks you have terminal benchmark SV benchmarks like
1:05:56all handle all avenues of life are like are now covered by five benchmarks. So benchmarking is kind of like disappeared simply because you don't know which benchmarks to benchmarks, right?
1:06:05And I was going to say also the overfitting to the benchmarks as well, right? What we really what we really need is something that's independently verified that people can actually point to and go, you know, this is the source of truth that we can actually lose, right? Because sometimes they're just actually maxing to complete that benchmark.
1:06:18Exactly. It's just a number.
1:06:19Yeah. I think it's like anytime you see a new benchmark released, it's suddenly all of the models get zero% added and then over the [laughter] next few months they start to like Yeah. How how how does this even possible?
1:06:30You update benchmarks all the time.
1:06:32Yeah, exactly. So, you need to just any benchmark that's been around for too long is pretty much stale and doesn't really tell you very much about what's going on when it comes to choosing your model. Right. We saw this at the beginning of this year. I I use benchmark maxing. Now I'm going to go to token maxing.
1:06:47How quickly that has changed, right? It was this idea that employees at companies would try to use so many tokens to show that they're using AI and costs just spiraled out of control. Did you have like a physical reaction to that? Was that that ever that never happened? Did that happen in Europe in the same way as in the US? It seems like a very Silicon Valley thing. Yeah.
1:07:08No, I think it happened everywhere like at least it happened like through these companies that uh were trying to like push the AI adoption especially on the engineering side right but no one exactly knew how that like what exactly are we going for right so everyone just went okay let's just use the thing right and it it led to a lot of unhealthy situations and now we all have usage limits Alex like I I'm actually guilty of this too.
1:07:37I always think I need the best model whether I'm using like claude or chat GPT even though I clearly don't but do you get that too companies I mean they've had to move away from this because they blew through budgets. Um do you think that many of them are turning to open source or I'm unclear how quickly it's happening in the enterprise like certainly among developers but how do you see that taking hold in a really great example would perhaps be Shopify. So they process, you know, over 40 million LLM queries every single day.
1:08:06You know, it's a huge amount of volume that they're dealing with. And I think this is really where open source models can be very very useful. So the utility that they hold is far harder than say, you know, using a frontier model for absolutely everything. Um, and I think, you know, what they're able to do now is, you know, use, for example, more senior models as a judge for the open- source outputs and actually be able to sort of, you know, both reduce well reduce cost, but also, you know, the the the latency as well comes comes right down too. So I think you know it's it's this ability of choosing okay let's actually choose an open source model but
1:08:35actually fine-tune it to a specific task and when you have that role clearly defined all of a sudden the games that you can unlock are just enormous right and you know Danila I feel like there's maybe some misconceptions still around open source certainly in the US the best ones that have come out this year have been Chinese we've had a lot of western ones in the last few weeks um I don't you know again I look at them through benchmarks everyone is touting their own benchmarks I don't actually know but the Chinese ones have gained a lot of adoption. What are some
1:09:02misconceptions about using those for developers and companies?
1:09:08The most common misconception I hear is that uh the fact that they trainee actually plays a role, right?
1:09:14They are open weights. They're open source. They can be fine-tuned and so you're actually hosting them on your own infrastructure. Yeah, we do we do a lot and we provide managed services on top of those models and we work with partners to provide fine-tuned versions of those models and it's never a problem and it should not be the problem because like here you look at it it's just data right it's just a snapshot of data that someone produced it cannot be harmful or harmless right it's like it's exactly the same so I I I
1:09:43strongly believe open source open weights is open and that's what matters right the source of it it might be strategy of how do we improve on that? Do we expect new versions of that? What would be the uh the models that they will be distributed? These models will be distributed, right? Like we see a commercialization on like uh for these Chinese labs nowadays, right? They want to participate in revenue share from this uh but they still maintain it open.
1:10:11They keep it open, right?
1:10:12So I think that's the only thing that matters really.
1:10:14Yes. Like do does it you know is it okay if the world builds on Chinese openweight models? Do we need western champions? Obviously Europe with Mistral was was very early to this. So was Llama Meta backed off now they're kind of going back towards it. Um do we need them to be based here?
1:10:30So I couldn't agree more with you know I think ultimately their models and once they're released it doesn't matter as much where where where where where they came from but I think it's important just to really like try to collaborate as much as possible. I come from an academic background where really that wasn't there wasn't as much difference like where people came from as long as you can go go together and and build better and better models right I think that that is the key the more parties kind of come in into the race the more
1:10:58it accelerates and the better open source models are are are we going to get like I understand that there are some concerns about uh sovereignty and like continent by continent security and like getting the expertise but you know I'm not an expert on So I'll stick to the science and you know I think it's just the more people trying to build open source models the better for the ecosystem. We have a richer ecosystem more models they all race against they all learn from each other and ultimately we should embrace like everyone trying
1:11:26to get in on on on the race.
1:11:28One of the criticisms of open source is security which I realize it can be like two things that can actually make it a lot more safe but then critics say that it actually can be less secure. Alex um how do you think about that trade-off?
1:11:40And I'm thinking even of like the hugging face example, right? Um a closed model attacked a swarm of agents, closed model, attacked them. They had to use an open source model to actually subdue it, subdue the attack.
1:11:52This evil kind of [laughter] right. Exactly. I I think it's, you know, really important well a to clearly define your sandbox so that stuff like that doesn't happen. Um but also I think in in another uh vein, it's it's, you know, understand the problem that it is that you're trying to solve at the at the end of the day. Because if you're a financial institution and you're dealing with an awful lot of sensitive data, you know, maybe running your open source models locally on your own on your own infrastructure is really really important. But maybe if you're dealing with slightly less sensitive data, then maybe using something like, for example, the Nevius token factory, you know, all of a sudden you can you can access
1:12:21[laughter] you you can access that level of infrastructure without the engineering headache yourself, right?
1:12:26And you know, you've got for example models such as Meta's new Muse Spark open. It's over 700 gigabytes which can be, you know, a right pain to set up yourself. All of a sudden we can tap into that you know uh through a online platform where it's you know a sort of centralized source of truth that can host inference you know fine-tuning model rooting all of that in one place then all of a sudden that's far far easier.
1:12:48Um Yasik maybe final one to you is how did the Chinese models become so good you know there's this tendency to think that it was just distillation but it's more than that. Right.
1:12:58Right. So, you know, I'm obviously not in their heads, so it's hard [laughter] for me to say. I understand like I understand that like destination can can can be part of it, but I think it's probably a lot about creating new synthetic data using the previous generation of models. And I would imagine that any frontier lab is not just sourcing data from humans, but they're also using previous generation of models in the right environment to create synthetic data from new generation of models. So in that sense you might say that labs are distilling
1:13:27from themselves saying how Chinese models are being distilled from previous version. I think there's a lot of LLM work like necessary to produce the next gener generation of LLMs who exactly they're distilling from. Is it from Anthropic OpenAI or from other Chinese models? I mean I think we would have to ask them. I don't know but uh I would imagine that it's not such an uncommon practice across across the whole the whole range of players.
1:13:52Right. Right. It's it's been here from the beginning. Yeah, but anyway you cannot just attribute that to distillation because the amount of like novel engineering and open source not just in terms of models but in terms of pieces of infrastructure, pieces of frameworks like code that actually trains models. You see that there is a lot of very uh particular and peculiar work that's happening in those labs. So it can't just like disregard it. Oh, they just distill things.
1:14:18Yeah. GRPO is a de facto standard for for it came from deepseek when they released their first like visioning model.
1:14:26Yeah, it's interesting. Now they're making a lot of new innovations on that open weight side. Um guys, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Great conversation.
1:14:34Pleasure. Our pleasure.
1:14:36Coming up, we are returning to physical AI and how advances in generative AI are finding applications in robotics. First, take a look at Recraft. In 2022, the imagination wave was only starting and it was [music] a chance for us to take part in this wave and to reshape how the future looks. So, we took the chance and that was super inspiring.
1:15:09[music] You might question cuz it's a real photograph. We are building image generation models [music] from scratch for this new generation of creative professionals who are using AI. That's the reason we are working with Nervous. [music] My name is Anna Ranica Dush and I'm the founder and CEO of ReCraft. [music] The landscape of graphic design has changed dramatically. This [music] image is much more polished and more like something you would use in your design portfolio.
1:15:44We are [music] not competing with OpenAI or Google. We have a very unique niche, [music] the niche of aesthetics, the niche of professional design, the niche of personalized beautiful images.
1:15:56[music] We can get this kind of image in our model. What I really appreciate about Nervios is that we [music] get great support and we have direct access to the engineering team so that when [music] we are testing something that is very new on the edge we can work with engineers to fix all the problems.
1:16:17[music] The second thing is the very early access to everything that Nvidia [music] builds which is also important because we want our users to have lowest latency. We also want our training runs to be [music] as efficient as possible.
1:16:34In [music] Nambus, we run inference but also training pipelines. In Ephance, we utilize multiple data centers in multiple place in the world to gain accessibility to gain reliability and to gain the lowest [music] latency. So we really need multiple clusters, multiple data centers to run our [music] inference in every data center. We use multiple types of GPUs because some our
1:17:04models actually run on specific type of GPUs. Let's say hopper generation. Other parts of pipelines run on black wall.
1:17:13We want [music] our inference to be fast as fast as possible. And we also want to have it stable so that recraft is always up. It never goes down.
1:17:24Our communication with no is very very intense. We are constantly talking to them and they are replying really really fast even on weekends or like out of typical office hours.
1:17:41Deciding to build specifically for the design community was a bit of a personal choice because I have a sister who is a designer. [music] So I had a chance to understand the value that we as a company could bring to design. [music] I think it's a very exciting time to build right now. There are chances to build something [music] that is used by a lot a lot of people and it's easier to
1:18:07do now than ever before AI generated video is getting very good and now there's growing interest and whether the same technology could help train robots to understand, predict, and interact with the physical world. Joining me are Lucas Ziegler, robotics evangelist and investor at Botnanza, and Zeb Farbin, founder and CEO of LTX.
1:18:45Thanks so much for having me.
1:18:47Of course. I mean, give me first your impressions on the physical AI side of GTC of Berlin this week. It's playing, you know, a major role. Lucas, you go first.
1:18:55Absolutely. Yeah. So after listening to the keynote and seeing how many great European not only companies are present here um it's remarkable and I see that there is much more movement towards scaling up. So we've been in the phase of the pilots you know and the PC's which are great. Um there is a famous joke being said in Germany that some companies have more pilots than Luanza.
1:19:17Um so we go from pilots to actually ramping up scaling up the deployments and this is what I'm looking forward. So what robots are really good at adding productivity and efficiency and I think scaling up it's a good proof of that right so again it's that idea of like less pilots start doing you could you could see much more advanced use cases at the shop floor when you're here um so that's really cool okay cool talk about some of those use cases and I know you're also involved with world models um which is a fascinating space to be in if you could explain that a little bit too yes I think everyone is very impressed
1:19:46by the way that large language models were able to scale abstract intelligence right They're proving amazing theories in math doing coding. But what they can do is reliably operate in the world.
1:19:59They don't have an intrinsic notion of time. They don't understand space very well. And typically in order to do that, they rely on tools. They're not intrinsic to how these models were created. So what happened earlier this year is people realized that when we're training video models, they understand a ton about how the physical world operates. So you can think about them as intuitive physicists. They maybe not give you like equations in the
1:20:27mathematical form you're familiar with, but we are creating a very convincing simulation of reality. And earlier this year, starting with the dream zero paper by Nvidia, people realize that you can take a pre-trained video model and adapt it to actually act in the physical world. And the way it happens is actually conceptually very simple. The robot is looking at the image getting some kind of instruction what it should perform and then it hallucinate in a sense what's going to happen next. It's create like a short video very short one
1:20:57it can be like a a less than half a second and then it gives it a prediction on how should it move itself to in order to accomplish the action. So this loop of hallucination and then moving its hands or actuators it's this is exactly what world models do and they show that in these texts they were way more general and more robust than the previous paradigms like VAS like vision language actions where we tried to rely
1:21:26on large language models to do something that's kind of less natural to them. So you're doing you're basically creating like a loop where it's doing an action over and over and then when you put that in the real world it works. Is that like I mean it's very surprising but imagine before we had to teach the robot every task. We had like this teley op and you're doing that in the physical world.
1:21:46Yeah. So now we world models because they saw for example humans doing all these things so many times they can zero short a lot of things. you can ask a robot to prepare you a toast and although it was never programmed it to do exactly that it does it well enough on the first go because you need it to be safe right um you know Lucas talk a little bit about that we talked about that in a previous panel there's really very few very few room for error in this world especially when you're putting something on the real world right
1:22:16yeah especially if you put something that needs to be as I said super productive in the factory you expect it first to be productive and efficient second it must be if it's going to operate around humans. So that's that's definitely a paradigm that we need to take into consideration. I know that there is a lot of techno optimism that wants to have also like robots at home and I think this is also additional factor to make sure that you know robots are safe and uh yeah it's actually very um you know very comforting that there is so many startups actually u you know
1:22:44working on the on the solutions in the safety side. I think last last week there was a pretty decent seed round for a company Save World that is that is working on you know adding the simulation layer into the safety process just to make sure to consider all the potential scenarios that can happen in the factory in the warehouse but also in the in our household. So definitely one of the most critical aspects just to scale up and ramp up robotics deployments there. Zev, how much does safety play in? And also explain like what you describe to me as well sounds a
1:23:12little bit like the omniverse. Is there different like how explain to me the difference between an omniverse to plan something out versus world models? Do they play into each other?
1:23:24Seriously guys like safety is a very multi-tered and complex issue and there are a lot of ways to reduce the dangers before the model layer. So a robotic manufacturer start to create like this lowlevel safety features. For example, if you are creating like a humanoid robot, you can make sure that let's say it gets a pressure beyond a certain point, the robot just like shuts down.
1:23:49That doesn't even happen on the model layer. It's like built in safety feature in the hardware. So if like pushing someone like too hard, I immediately like you know shutting down as a robot.
1:23:58Another thing is that when we think about robots, we immediately think about like annoying household chores and how we're going to help us, but a home might be like the last environment where it's going to become plausible because imagine what you need to do in order to leave the robot with your kids alone, right? What happens when it prepares like a toast for them?
1:24:20There's like some I don't know like electricity problem or etc. Should it call the I don't know the police? Like what's the expectation from the household robot? And another domains that sound perhaps more complicated the safety can be easier. Think about even like heavy machinery that's required to build a construction site, right? Like a house or a building.
1:24:40You can make sure that there are like no people there at all. So like the worst case scenario is like some kind of economical financial damage, but you're not going to kill anyone which is very important. So I think what's going to happen at the moment people are going to try to do robotics with different domains and actually think like industrial robot constructions are going to be before households because the safety issues are like easier to resolve there.
1:25:04Completely agree and I I just wanted to add when it comes to households I think households and houses our apartments one of the most unstructured environments if you think of it right factories and warehouses are actually quite structured. So, right, but then it sort of gets to this debate between like a form factor, right? Do you have a humanoid robot because they're modeled after us and they can exist in the world or do you need specialized robots for every single thing? Um, like the answer is probably both and we probably get to the, you know, the specific ones first. Yeah. But
1:25:33what is your prediction for when we actually get them in the in the home?
1:25:37Um, you mean in general robots or the humanoids?
1:25:39Humanoid robots. The humanist from the safety perspective are tricky because there are so many, you know, they they are they are so advanced, they are so complex. Um, did you see that video where a robot walked into a mirror and then there's shattered glass everywhere?
1:25:51Yeah. Yeah. For example, um when it comes to form factor, I think that Travis Kalanik did a very good point at the latest podcast with David Seno when he just was like saying like humanoids might be media at a lot of tasks but never would be like you know the the the goto the go-to form factor for something that you need optimized for for for you know production and efficiency. Um so I think there is room for both in in the house. I definitely think that you know humanoid is much more adaptable form factor that can help us with a lot of
1:26:21things but again it's we're ways away.
1:26:23Yeah. What what would be the choice if you you need to leave the humanoid in your home you go out your kids.
1:26:29So what what's your but give me like a time frame is that two three years away. That's who my panelists earlier today they said two to three years.
1:26:35I I would say within five years we can definitely have like an early version of Rosie the robot from the Jetsons in our apartments.
1:26:42It sounds about right. But guys remember that besides a humanoid form, there are like a bunch of other forms that are native to either to the world of humans, right? Like think about like dogs. Yeah.
1:26:52Dogs are operating, right? Like we we have dogs with us. So they're more sturdy maybe.
1:26:56No, exactly. For certain task, right?
1:26:58When you rescue people in certain environments like dogs make more sense like by now drones is already like established type of machinery. So some people are doing that. Obviously industrial robots certain types of safety are easy to do there because with some of them there's like no locomotion. It's basically a hand. So you can figure out like the radius and figure out stuff around that.
1:27:18So I think all these different types of embodiment makes sense because they already have like some kind of machines or human doing this thing. So we can kind of and so a lot of startups they seeing in the space actually trying to figure out how you create a layer that works across different embodiment. So you me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me mentioned like Nvidia ST they they put a lot of effort to make sure that when you're like training something you can move between different embodiment and testing the simulator so I don't think it's going to be one form factor
1:27:48right and you know it may not be able to do everything but it can do many things exactly you know not everything human can do um Lucas Zav thank you very much for being with me great discussion thank you so much pleasure more from Nebas live right after Yes,
1:28:10we're trying to give regulated industries or low risk tolerance industries the ability to accelerate their software development with AI. We train models to deploy into fully airgapped environments. Working with Nebius has been fantastic because you guys support us at the same speed [music] that we wish to experiment at. I'm Yang. I'm co-founder and chief operating officer at cosign.
1:28:34We started playing with GPT3 when it first launched and this was before chat GPT came out and that was a light bulb moment for us. We realized that the model itself could output JSON which meant that we can now daisy chain the outputs into the inputs and then so on and so forth and that for us clicked.
1:28:50Even though the model was still quite unintelligent, the context [music] window was I think 4K uh so very very small compared to what we have now millions of know tokens wide. But actually that was the aha where we thought we've got to go all in. Like I don't know exactly what we were going to build but we were just going to build and we'll figure it out as we go.
1:29:09Initially what brought us to Nebus was actually just the ease of spinning up an instance. As we've scaled and we started running bigger and more complex experiments, Nebus has actually scaled perfectly with us.
1:29:23The UK government announced a 500 million pound fund where they are backing UK startups to build sovereign AI solutions and we are one of seven startups. We are getting [music] access to both the compute the capital the people and also government data. anyone training models whether it's supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning I think fundamentally you know it's garbage in garbage out right and the equivalent hopefully the other side is you know great things in and great things out for us we're at a place where
1:29:51I think the world has saturated all publicly available data [music] I think to a certain extent you've also saturated human labelled data and actually I think the next frontier is synthetic data I'm [music] not unique in this point of view Elon Musk talks very publicly at XAI that all of their data for their next model is going to be synthetic I think for us [music] because we focus on regulated industries, niche coding languages, workflows and kind of sort of performance and behavior that is out of distribution even for the world's largest labs, we are forced very early
1:30:21on [music] to think of synthetic data generation. And for us, we do two things that I think are very special. Number one is [music] that because we have a world-class coding agent, we can spin up kind of code execution environments, the RL [music] environments very easily. And secondly form the problem with a lot of data that you can scrape or access or buy or generate is that you don't have a ground truth. What we can do is generate both the actual the environment but also the mark scheme at the end. My advice would be to do things that are not
1:30:48scalable. Like do the hard thing like if a customer tells you there's a problem and you think that no one else has tackled [music] it, don't just assume that it can't be done. Secondly, take every shortcut you can. You have nothing to lose. You're starting from scratch. do take every shortcut. And [music] the last piece I think for me is find people that are on this journey with you because they believe in the mission.
1:31:29It's been a volatile few few weeks for the AI trade. Investors are weighing enormous spending commitments against questions about demand, financing, and how quickly that investment will pay off. And of course, we've just heard from Jensen Hong, whose outlook has major implications for companies across the AI ecosystem. Joining me to discuss are Kelly Kung from Asel and Nebus Chief Communications Officer Tom Blackwell.
1:31:52Welcome to you both. Um, happy to be here. Tom, we're now at the end of, you know, day one of Nebius Live and, you know, the end of sort of Jensen Hong's European tour that has put the European AI stack ecosystem really in focus for the rest of the world. How do you judge it? Was it successful? Listen, I think that it's uh I think it's been a successful day, but I think what it's done is it's shone a light on exactly the the challenges that the whole world
1:32:20faces, including what Europe faces in terms of continuing to be able to facilitate the buildout of infrastructure that we think is going to be critical for the future of the AI ecosystem in Europe. So, a lot of challenges, a lot of work to be done. Uh but these are important events to shine a light on that, right? And you know, Nebius is working with startups and established companies alike. Um and I it feels like the message from both sides is compute constrained, right? Um how do you sort of manage that? How do you manage the
1:32:49messaging around that when you're trying to bring on as much online as fast as you can?
1:32:53Well, compute is definitely constrained and what we're seeing is demand is off the charts and the world can't build fast enough to provide the compute that the AI ecosystem needs and that that relates to Europe, that relates to us, that relates to the entire world. But we're building fast. Uh, and that's what one of the things that we're doing to try and address and to bridge the gap between between supply and demand. We're building in France and Finland, Spain, UK, and elsewhere in Europe. So, um, you know, but there there are challenges that need to be solved to continue to build out at that pace.
1:33:19Right. Kelly, you split your time between the Bay Area and Europe, London.
1:33:23Um, what would you say are some of the main differences between, you know, the ecosystem over there and here?
1:33:29For sure. So the reason why I split my time between the two places is because the core belief that Axel has always had is talent is distributed and talent comes from everywhere, right?
1:33:38Um so you know 30 years ago we set boots on the ground in Europe. We were one of the first VCs to be here to help build out the ecosystem and also one of the few VCs that stayed through all the cycles. So I'd say that um a lot of the talent right now is building global from day one. That's what AI allows. So examples like you know Anton from Lovable, Max from Lagora, um Eric Modal, you know there have kind of Nordic roots but then build in New York and so we see actually the world becoming a lot more
1:34:07fluid and that means I need to be on a plane a lot more often and having two apartments in in both places, right? And going back and forth. I mean, I was talking to some of the founders um at the GTC event talking about how they're splitting their time as well, and it's almost like they talk about having to have a presence in San Francisco as an inevitability. Um is it better that way or should European startups be able to totally operate from here? What's missing?
1:34:32I think that um the first thing to note is we are very much in early innings of this whole wave, right?
1:34:39That means we're building out the infrastructure. you know, Nebius is a huge part of that and we are still in the process of putting picks and shovels into the ground. Um, what that means is I think people are congregating in San Francisco. I think that's undeniable. If you look at, you know, the kind of onem radius around South Park, a lot of the money is there. A lot of the companies and AI engineers are there. But what will happen, I think, is AI is the usage
1:35:08of it is distributed, right? And so we see a lot of customers from the Nebia side as well like European enterprise. I mean Jensen today was talking about Nvidia's first and current customers being seammens and you know synopsis or whoever they're they're really distributed. So I do believe that in this early phase of the wave there is a bit of concentration because people are flocking to where everyone's working 996 but then it will distribute and it has been distributed through.
1:35:36Tom do you see the same thing? Do you think that this sort of the way that it's so distributed does it become concentrated over time?
1:35:43Look, what we've seen so far is that actually we Nebus, we launched Nebus just over a couple of years ago and to begin with the main space that we were very active in where we've really become leaders in servicing the AI startups and the AI natives. Now the reality is the vast majority of them are in the Bay Area. They're in the same uh one mile area that Kelly was talking about. But when we look to the future, actually the the big opportunity and where the real growth will come from is enterprise adoption. I don't think Europe will catch up with the Bay Area in terms of startups, but when it comes to enterprise adoption, that's a different game, right? And I think that there
1:36:12you'll find Europe can be comparable, if not even in the lead when it comes to enterprise adoption. So for us, when we think about servicing the kind of having a global infrastructure footprint and being able to service the global market, we need to be there here and everywhere.
1:36:24Do you see that category as more sustainable too? Well, I think that it's, you know, we will always have AI startups, but actually that sector will evolve and then some of them will become big enterprise or they'll become big tech and so on. And so I think yeah, probably that's right. If you look at the the years to come, again, the majority of the growth we believe will come from the enterprise adoption, right? Um, Kelly, I was talking to my panelists earlier today. It was a group of European startups and you know, we asked them, do you think that AI will
1:36:54lead to Europe having its first trillion dollar company? And you know when might that be if you think that's going to happen?
1:36:59I truly believe it. Um I mean Nebius I would say Nebius but I'm biased since our partnership uh over two years ago has been an amazing journey. Um so if you look at actually we did this analysis if you look at I think 10 years ago there were not that many kind of decacorns out of Europe and then recently there's been five to 10. And so I I don't think it's out of the realm possible that they will have a trillion dollar company.
1:37:25Right. You know, one of my guests said something interesting. Everyone said yes, yes, it's gonna happen. My BS. Um, Nebas is, you know, in a already, you know, on its way. And I wonder though, one of the guests said that I'd rather instead of have one trillion dollar company, have many hundred billion dollar companies in Europe. And that is something that I could see being in Nebius's interest as well.
1:37:45I think so. And I think that's probably consistent with what we're seeing as well. I mean, that doesn't that's not to say there won't be a trillion dollar company, but I but the but the idea that you're going to have many hundred billion dollars We are well on track for that and that's very critical actually to developing an ecosystem right because we see a lot of mafias come out and if you have multiple hundred billion dollar companies that actually compounds right and you know exactly you want to give sort of the smaller tech a chance to to do things. Um the other thing that when I think about the differences
1:38:14between you know the European and the US or the Bay Area startup ecosystem is the size of the checks. Kelly um talk a little bit about investing in both places. Yeah. So, I mean, so at Excel, we have a a pool of capital on top that we call late stage capital. It's about $6 billion and we invest globally. The rounds are getting faster, the rounds are getting bigger, but that's why we are kind of repositioning ourselves to be ready for that.
1:38:39Yeah. Um, Kelly and Tom, great discussion. Thank you very much for being here with me.
1:38:43Thank you for having us.
1:38:43Thanks for having us.
1:38:45That brings us to the end of day one, but we have a lot more coming up tomorrow on Nebus Live. I will be sitting down with Nebius, founder and CEO himself, Arcadi Velas, Carmen Lee, CEO of Silicon Data, and leaders from Coher and Shopify. We will also hear from the founders of Bitvo, Cursive, and Nive AI along with AI educator Harper Carroll. Plenty more to discuss about where AI is headed. We'll continue to break down GTC this week. And of course, we'll be talking about the businesses
1:39:13being built all around this. That is all for us today. Thank you so much for joining us here in Berlin. We'll see you tomorrow at 10 a.m. Berlin time. Thanks,