Five architects of the AI economy explain where the wheels are coming off
Key takeaways
- (Meta s former chief AI scientist, Yan LeCun, signed on as founding chair of its technical research board earlier this year.)
- The AI boom is running into hard physical limits, and the constraints begin further down the stack than many may realize.
- For Younis, the constraint comes primarily from elsewhere.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong.
On stage with Tech Crunch: Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, the Dutch company that holds a monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which modern chips would not exist; Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, who is overseeing one of the biggest infrastructure bets in corporate history; Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a $15 billion physical AI company that started in simulation and has since moved into defense; Dimitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer of Perplexity, the AI-native search-to-agents company; and Eve Bodnia, a quantum physicist who left academia to challenge the foundational architecture most of the AI industry takes for granted at her startup, Logical Intelligence. (Meta s former chief AI scientist, Yan LeCun, signed on as founding chair of its technical research board earlier this year.)
The AI boom is running into hard physical limits, and the constraints begin further down the stack than many may realize. Fouquet was the first to say it, describing a huge acceleration of chips manufacturing, while expressing his strong belief that despite all that effort, for the next two, three, maybe five years, the market will be supply limited, meaning the hyperscalers — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta — aren t going to get all the chips they re paying for, full stop.