There's a line from a recent David Lin conversation with Clem Chambers that stuck with me: the real money in AI isn't the chatbots. It's the physical layer. Chips, servers, drives, cables, cooling, power, buildings, and the banks writing the cheques for all of it.
You can't buy OpenAI or Anthropic directly. You can buy the people selling them electricity and silicon.
That framing is easy to nod along to and hard to act on, because most people arguing about AI hardware are actually arguing about one company's stock price. So I want to go a level down. Not "buy the picks and shovels" as a slogan, but: what is the actual bottleneck inside the box, who is attacking it from which angle, and what does a founder do with that information on a Tuesday morning.
I'll use Groq as the worked example, because it's the clearest case of a company that ignored the obvious problem and went after a different one.
Part 1: Why the physical layer argument holds
