All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
The AI Cold War, Signalgate, CoreWeave IPO, Tariff Endgames, El Salvador Deportations
Sat, 29 Mar 2025
(0:00) The Besties welcome Gavin Baker back on the show! (1:20) Nvidia balance sheet questions, CoreWeave IPO, M&A/IPO bounce back (16:22) US vs China in AI: Manus, China building its own Nvidia, and more (28:37) The Administration's endgame for tariffs (53:05) Signalgate: context and fallout (1:09:42) El Salvador deportations Follow Gavin: https://x.com/GavinSBaker Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.reuters.com/technology/coreweave-planning-cut-us-ipo-size-price-below-range-source-says-2025-03-27 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-adds-dozens-entities-export-restriction-list-2025-03-25 https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-plots-charging-20-000-a-month-for-phd-level-agents?rc=pxkrxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8wJc7vHcTs https://x.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1905296181208416744 https://x.com/chamath/status/1904547884877701610 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/invocation-of-the-alien-enemies-act-regarding-the-invasion-of-the-united-states-by-tren-de-aragua https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador https://x.com/Sec_Noem/status/1905034256826408982
Chapter 1: Who is Gavin Baker and what is his role in the podcast?
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one state sponsor. I'm sorry. All in podcast in the world. The number one podcast. Oh, sorry. Stray bullets. Here we go. Back on the program. Our guy, Gavin Baker, is here. You know him from a treaties management does private and public four billion under management. And lots to talk about with you. GB1. Good to have you here. GB1 is here.
Chapter 2: What are the financial challenges faced by Nvidia and CoreWeave?
Solo, dolo. CoreWeave IPO happening soon by the time you get this. And NVIDIA, you were there at NVIDIA. You are the one analyst, Gavin, that Jensen pulled up. You're loved by Jensen. What's it like to be loved by Jensen? Tell us everything.
Well, so first thing he did, there was Alfred was from Sequoia.
Mm-hmm.
And then they had a nice sell-side guy whose name is escaping me at the moment. But it is technically true. I was the only public equity investor on the buy side that Jensen asked. I've known Jensen for 25 years. He's kind of the same guy he ever was, just maybe slightly calmer.
Gavin, can I ask you, all this stuff where they talk about the... balance sheet questions that some folks have about NVIDIA, some of the accounts receivable issues and stuff. Is there any legitimacy to those issues, the round tripping? What's the real story of someone that peers into that P&L and understands it?
Yeah, so I guess maybe take them in reverse order. I really don't think, like if NVIDIA had not put any money into CoreWeave, not put any money into kind of other of these neoclouds, I don't think it would have impacted their revenues at all. At all.
They would have sold... More to Meta and more to Tesla.
Yeah, more to Meta, more to Amazon, more to Microsoft. So the reason they did it is even three years ago, it was a very stable three-player oligopoly from the cloud computing players in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And if you're NVIDIA, that's not great to have just three big customers.
Those big clouds, particularly in 2023, when there was such a rush to get GPUs, they each kind of want to do their own kind of custom version of an NVIDIA server. And NVIDIA, by giving kind of like a standard reference design, which someone like CoreWeave bought to CoreWeave, you got GPUs in the market a lot faster.
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Chapter 3: How is the US-China AI conflict evolving?
So you cool those GPUs, and the biggest problem with GPUs, one of the biggest, is they melt. You cool it with air. Blackwell weighs 3,000 pounds. So three times as much the rack, you know, it's eight feet tall, maybe five feet deep or four feet deep, 3,000 pounds. And it consumes 120 kilowatts.
So twice as much power and roughly kind of the same footprint, three times as much weight and it's liquid cooled. So this is like an iPhone upgrade cycle. You know, it was like, It's still a pain that we went from, you know, lightning to USB-C. You know, I'll grab a cord and it'll be lightning instead of USB-C.
This is like an iPhone upgrade cycle where to get the new iPhone, not only do you have to change your connectors, you have to put in a new generator, you have to put in a new boiler and a whole house humidification system, you know, to kind of make it work. So it's a monumental product transition and I think that is a lot of why the receivables went up.
They were recognizing Blackwell revenue while it was still kind of getting into customers' hands. If that trend continues past the July quarter, then I would say, hey, that's reason for concern, but this is a very understandable time for that to happen from my perspective.
So basically the summary is AR, accounts receivable, builds as you go through this very complicated product transition. But then at some point, it peaks. And then you start to work through all of it. And it moves off balance sheet basically gets recognized and you move forward. And so then that AR should shrink.
And just to clarify that that's accounts receivable. That's the money owed to you by customers for the audience who might have a question what they are exactly. And The reason they're not collecting it is because they haven't delivered it.
I mean, the accounting gets very complicated with these systems. But yes, I mean, they have delivered it and they recognize the revenue. But maybe the customer is saying, hey, we're not going to pay you until X, you know, until we get them plugged in and working. I mean, who knows what it is?
Got it. Because it's a new thing.
Yeah, but it makes total sense to have accounts receivable. It's just that here the accounts receivable have gone up more than sales. And that's just a function of the complexity of this product transition.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the CoreWeave IPO?
Oh, yeah. And I think this will be part of, you know, the upcoming negotiation between America and China. But it is hard. You know, if we can't, you know, if America cannot keep illegal drugs out of, you know, out of our own country, these GPUs are arguably dramatically more valuable per capita
unit you know like a blackwell is like you know the size of this and it's just hard particularly like you know america we're trying to keep drugs out here china is trying to bring the gpus in and it's kind of significantly you know i think harder to prevent than than you know smuggling of illegal drugs now everybody does their best but um
Yeah, the United States, I think it's always going to be kind of a game of cat and mouse until you get some sort of grand bargain. And right now they're allowed to sell certain kinds of GPUs into China, and I'm sure there'll be
Should we be doing that, Gavin? Is this going to be an effective strategy? If you were advising the president, would you say, just let NVIDIA sell them? It's a fool's errand to try to stop them because they're all going to Singapore or wherever, Vietnam, and routing their way around.
I think we're putting enough friction into the system. that it does theoretically give America an advantage at the cost of creating tremendous incentives for China to develop their own semiconductor ecosystem and, you know, pressure to kind of, you know, necessity is the mother of innovation.
And these export controls are creating an immense incentive for China to be really algorithmically innovative. And you saw that with DeepSeek, where there were some real algorithmic innovations.
Yeah.
So, said another way, if we squeeze too tightly on letting them buy the NVIDIA chips, they might make a better NVIDIA. I think they're doing it now. They're trying now. Well, they're trying, but I guess what are the chances they succeed in your mind, Gavin, in creating something competitive with or better? And then what would that say about the AI race?
In the next five years, I think zero. I think it's really, really hard. But over the 10 years, who knows? And if you're the CCP, 10 years isn't that long. If you're America, 10 years is an eternity.
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Chapter 5: How is the US handling the AI Cold War with China?
And the Democrats, disgrats the odd for not having a speed run primary. Signalgate, that's the biggest story in America right now.
I think J. Cal is turning. This is incredible. What a day.
No, I mean, listen, I'm going to call balls and strikes. Right now, 70% of what they're doing, I agree with. 30%, I don't. I'm going to get to the 30% on a human rights basis.
I think you just admitted you voted for Trump. It's really incredible, actually.
Anyway, let's keep moving here. I'm from the great state of Texas. I'll leave it at that. Signalgate, Signalgate, Signalgate. On Monday, the Atlantic published a story titled, The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Their War Plan Somehow. Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a super high-profile signal group.
with our Secretary of State, our Vice President, Tulsi Besant, the CIA director, the Secretary of Defense. How is this possible, folks? They added a journalist, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to their war planning signal group. They shouldn't be using signal, obviously, to do this stuff. And inside this group, they discussed the plans to strike Houthi targets across Yemen, Nobody noticed.
Nobody checked that the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was in the group chat. They included the exact targets, the actions, the timing of all of this. It was apparently cut and pasted from some other system by HEGSEP, our secretary of defense and former Fox commentator. That's not a dig. It's just a fact. I'm not saying it as a dig. Chamath. People are losing their mind over this.
I could get into all the details. I think most people know it because it's taking up the whole... all the oxygen in the room, in the media, in the group chats. Number one, what's your general take on what happened here? How stupid is this? How ridiculous is it? Does it matter? Go ahead, Shamal.
Start us off here. I think that what folks have stopped talking about entirely, which I think is just worth touching upon, is what is actually going on that necessitated this group chat to be created in the first place in such haste. I have a couple of images that I pulled just to explain what this issue is. The problem that we have is that somewhere after the war with Gaza,
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Chapter 6: What caused 'Signalgate' and why is it significant?
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Chapter 7: What is the controversy surrounding El Salvador deportations?
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