Meta’s VP of Wearables on AI Glasses Business Model, OpenAI Poaches Apple’s AI Talent | Sep 19, 2025

28:23I think the thing that people will be most interested in is that now instead of just offering an ARM-based CPU next to the NVIDIA GPU, NVIDIA wants a tighter integration with the x86 architecture, which is the kind of processor that Intel and AMD build. So yeah, what you need to know is that there is, NVIDIA has a large stake in Intel now, and they're working on two products. And very quickly, just for people who might not be as familiar, just explain to us the relationship between GPUs and CPUs and how they sort of relate to each other in this story here. So before AI, most data centers were filled with what you mentioned is called a CPU, Essential Processing Unit.

29:05They're the traditional workhorse of the data center and can do all kinds of typical computing tasks. but over the past two years, a lot of data center capacity has shifted to GPUs, which is the chip NVIDIA makes. And so, but you can't have a GPU work without a CPU. And so that's sort of where this Intel deal comes into play. Got it. Okay. That was the detail that I was hoping to get clarity on. Okay. So, Aaron, I want to come to you. Do you think this is a good deal for Intel? Is NVIDIA the winner? What do you think? I think at this point, probably any deal is a good deal for Intel, right? So I think what NDA is trying to do here is they're trying to figure out ways of continuing to grow their control of their production line, as well as like they do look at the steps even of the most recent acquisition.

29:55They're always trying to find ways to protect their kind of surrounding ecosystem and finding ways of increasing customer experience, reliability. because even under the previous CPU stage of, you could say, infrastructure, the end customer kind of lost control outside of the semiconductor. And so what he's trying to do is control more of that customer experience basically to be the apple of Silicon. So he's constantly trying to think of ways of assuring that the customer gets the best experience possible. And so some of the Intel stuff is to, you know, the fact that they're a struggling company, they're the one that has a legitimate boundary business in America.

30:32But the other one is that the alternative, would be AMD. And AMD has a quite robust GPU business line. And so if Intel goes under or disappears, then they have to buy the CPU that could fund the GPU that is the alternative to run their competitor. So I think it's more structured around that where they're kind of playing in their own defense here, but as well as they'd be still, as Anissi was saying, that they need CPUs to run in their HDX series and that there still is some technical limitations of ARM in the data center layer that they have to work through to get customers to move from x86, which is the Intel CPUs, into ARM.

31:13The ARM, I suspect, will continue to be the flagship of NVIDIA, but there's still going to be many years in which they need an x86 platform to continue to grow their business. Got it. Okay, well, Jay, those are some good points that Aaron brought up. What do you think? Do you agree? I don't totally agree. I think, like, first let me just say, Intel needs to survive. It's important for the industry. It's important for America. So them getting cash in the door, I think that helps. They need money to keep this going. But that's about it as far as this deal goes. I don't think there's a lot in here for Intel.

31:53It's a good deal for NVIDIA in that it gets them into Intel's sort of core cloud CPU base. In terms of absolute dollars, it's a pretty small revenue opportunity here because in most AI systems today that use GPUs, like Anissa says, every GPU cluster needs some number of CPUs attached to it, sort of 1 to 4, 1 to 8 kind of ratio. And today, NVIDIA has that CPU in their grace line of CPUs, and they're going to update that next year with Vera. And so they're in really good shape around that. But what this does is it does provide an alternative to AMD for those customers who want to use somebody else's CPU.

32:34They don't want to use an NVIDIA CPU. They don't want to be all NVIDIA, so they want some alternative. And it's going to be Intel. But I think most important, too, is this is a good deal for Intel's newest chairholder, the United States government. Jensen Huang made Donald Trump$3 billion yesterday. So not many people can say that. And I think that is part of calculus. You think that's the major calculus here in this investment? I don't know about major, but I think that is absolutely part of the calculus. Okay. Aaron, what do you think of that? I mean, I think we actually said the same thing.

33:12But there is a structural difference of adopting ARM to x86 that is quite significant. And so my firm is one of the largest buyers of the Grace series. And just remind x86 is the CPU. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a instruction set. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, and so, you know, like the, the, the future of data center infrastructure is, is ARM. It's the most logical kind of X and X iteration. Your phone is ARM and any type of like dense computing framework generally means an ARM based on efficiency. And as well as they, it continues the same trend of which that Jensen is, wants to continue the integrated zone ecosystem together to where he is like Apple.

33:52So it shouldn't be lost. I mean, he's literally used that metaphor. So it shouldn't be lost on you that Apple uses ARM. And again, just try to buy ARM. So that is a clear trajectory where he wants to go as a company. But the x86 problem is a significant problem if you're trying to win over enterprise customers. And I was saying that this money is like nothing compared to when you have a 60 % to 70 % profit margin, depending on what quarter what you're doing, you're selling hundreds of billions of dollars a year. like this is nothing on the on the spectrum for nvidia uh but but the founding program is is is super important uh to like a america sovereignty and and to jensen himself but you know jensen has put his bag with tsmc but but as jay was saying that there is clearly political orientation here like to look past that would be silly it is it's very it's staring right in front of your face right the intel needs to be supported that's true uh and it's semi-nationalized and some weird construct that we kind of embedded this administration.

34:53And so Jensen is the most important semiconductor company in the world. So you have to find ways in which they integrate these two things. Anissa, you were on the press call last night. What did you get from that? Was there anything about the Foundry business that they said that stood out to you? Yes. There were tons of questions to Jensen and Lipboo about whether this initial deal could potentially lead to NVIDIA becoming a customer of the Intel foundry down the line. And both executives did not directly answer that question. Jensen said something about how NVIDIA is always evaluating different options, but Lipu didn't really talk about this angle.

35:35And to what both Aaron and Jay are saying, the reason that the U.S. government cares so much about Intel is for its foundry. And this deal kind of had no optimism around that aspect of an Intel-NVIDIA relationship. It sounds like they didn't even talk about it. Right. They did not talk about it. We're hopeful. We want this. Jay, we were talking yesterday. Jay, you were astounded that this was the case. It was really remarkable to me that they spent all this time, at least half the calls, half the questions at the conference yesterday were about this, and they refused to commit to using Intel as a foundry.

36:12And what really stood out for me was Lip Bhutan, the CEO of Intel, could not say a single good thing about his own Foundry process. It was Jensen from NVIDIA who actually was able to talk up, oh, Intel has this great packaging. But even LipBoot, because you couldn't say, oh, we're going to evaluate everything, but we really like our internal process. He couldn't even say that. And I mean, that to me spoke volumes. I think he's, I think I'm very concerned about it. Like Aaron was saying, we need Intel Foundry to work for the industry, for the country. And I'm very, very concerned that doesn't have a future.

36:50Aaron, I'm going to give you 30 seconds here just to give us one last thought, and then I want to go on to Infabrica. Just get your last thought here, and then we'll move on. Well, I think that the Aaron's call, the last one that the Intel CEO did, he did basically kind of talk to Asher about his foundry and said that we're only going to do things which have this really high bar of customer orders. But as anyone who works in foundry knows, that gets much more of you have to integrate yourself to the customer and work with them over a number of years to finally launch a new product and and so the intel is actually from a technical perspective a very good engineering company it has a long track record of having great innovations great advancements on the chip side so they they can do this it's but it's just structurally they they got stuck into this they don't know how to service people outside of their own company and And I think it was a mistake under Pat to just say Intel has to be its own customer.

37:49I think that that was probably the mistake. But, you know, Pat had the general right orientation, which is like this business has to continue. Right. We could find a way of accelerating this. But I think they really struggled with trying to the idea of like, can we actually do everything Gento wants us to do? Right. Right. Adisa, I want to go to you. So this deal with Enfabrica. Fabrica. And Fabrica is a company that you actually know from our top 50, what do we call it? It's the information 50 most promising startups list. Yeah, we call it TI50 here in the newsroom. But and Fabrica was, I think, if I recall, the top pick in our compute category that you put together.

38:28I want to know why they were so high on your list, because that maybe might tell us something about why NVIDIA was so eager to go after the talent? I ranked Nfabrica high on the list of computing startups last year because they were tackling one of the major problems that companies face when they put together NVIDIA GPUs. These clusters of chips are getting larger and larger and the networking between each chip and between each rack system is not advancing at the same rate. And so the founders of Enfabrica wanted to create a better network fabric. I think you can sort of get how they chose their name.

39:09A better network fabric to connect large clusters of GPUs. And so they were building a technology that was clearly destined to work potentially in NVIDIA clusters. And NVIDIA cares a lot about networking. They obviously bought Mellanox. So that's why they were high on the load last year. Jay, I feel like this relates to a conversation that we had last time on the show, which is you talking about NVIDIA wanting to sell customers the entire package. And you actually saw that as something that could hold the business back. Well, I'll say this. The fight over AI compute is now very much shaping up to be a fight around networking.

39:49If you talk to NVIDIA, off the record, they'll say one of the big performance gains advantages they have versus the competition in GPU is the fact that they have this networking stack. And then in contrast, you have their rival in this space is shipping up to Broadcom, which has a company with deep, deep networking expertise. And so this is really the battle between these two companies. The biggest front that's going to open up this year or next year is going to be around networking. And so this AquaHire, at Infabrica is important because it really is sort of one more big raising the stakes even further in this upcoming fight.

40:26Right. If I remember correctly, the CEO of Infabrica was at Broadcom. So he's definitely like a well-known person. But I will mention, I talked to some people familiar with the deal last night and they mentioned, yes, this is, we're hiring, you know, NVIDIA is hiring the CEO, but they're also hiring a very large part of the engineering team and others at the firm. So it's sort of not like one of those AI startups where you could have one person who's the main deal that you want to hire. I get the sense that a lot of people at the company are going to go to NVIDIA. Aaron, you were nodding. What were your thoughts here?

41:01Do you think it was a surprising move at all? No, I mean, they love acquirers. That's a large portion of NVIDIA's acquisitions are acquirers. and as well as if you look at their their leptin acquisition if you look at the talent of that team many of them are experts in ARM and they have like a long track record of like building out ARM frameworks so they like hiring very good highly experienced people to join the team and as well as like you know for them the payout is immense and as well as like to Nvidia it's small and so when you're at this such scale as Jay was saying that it is a battle over networking and if you actually look at the depreciation schedules of, because I operate data centers, you look at depreciation schedules for the node versus the networking, networking is about twice as long as the nodes.

41:51So it's going to stay there twice as long as the actual compute equipment itself. And so it's a much more permanent set into the actual data center, as well as implementing networking is significantly harder to do than the rest of the actual stack. Because you can slot, and you're designing when you're implementing data center, you can slot the nodes out because you got to work on them occasionally. But the networking generally just stays there. And that's all the crazy cables you see, right? The cable work is like, that's a lot of man hours to do. So it's an important part of like maintaining his position in the market is maintaining control of networking.

42:23Right. Well, look, I think we could talk a lot longer about this. And, you know, we should have more networking startups on the show is my takeaway from this. So Anissa, maybe we'll get you to go back to those companies that you picked last year on TI-50. We'll see if a couple of their CEOs will come on because it's, I mean, look, we're batting a pretty high average here with those startups doing great things. Thank you so much to the three of you for coming on. We really appreciate it. That is Anissa, Jay, and Aaron. Okay. Well, Elon Musk has a number of lieutenants helping him run his empire.

42:58And today, my colleague Theo Waite published a profile on one of the most interesting people responsible for helping Musk achieve all of his data center ambitions. Brent Mayo has gone from working on oil rigs all over the world to now being key to XAI supercomputer efforts. And he's also an important character in a pollution battle that is shaking out in the city of Memphis. Joining me now is Theo Waite, our reporter on all things Elon Musk to tell us more about this story. Welcome to the show, Theo. Great to have you back. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so now before we get into Brent Mayo, I mean, I just want to set the stage a bit.

43:34I mean, we know that data centers are a huge part of the AI story, but I think one thing that we forget is just how big of a lift constructing these data centers are and how quickly they need to come up. So can you tell us more about that? Yeah, building a data center used to be something that took many years. You know, you'd have to build a building, you'd have to wait for approvals from utilities and governments and, you know, oftentimes it could take three, four, five years to get a facility online. The AI boom has made it so that companies are doing pretty extreme things to get data centers online as quickly as possible at all costs.

44:13And XAI is pretty much the most aggressive in that way. They've gone from zero data centers to two pretty massive, supersized facilities in Memphis in less than two years called Colossus one and Colossus two. You know, as you can see on the map there, they're in pretty dense areas of a city, which makes them pretty controversial locally. You know, we did an analysis for this story and found that, you know, within a five mile radius of these data centers, there's about 20 ,000 people within a five mile radius of the first one, 150 ,000 within a five mile radius of the second one. And the reason that matters is that XAI is using natural gas turbines to power these facilities rather than waiting for a connection to the grid, which is because of, you know, the super aggressive pace that Elon has set for them to get compute online as quickly as possible.

45:15And so you talked about the pollution issue. What do natural gas turbines here have to have to do with that? How do they make that worse? So they, you know, the turbines that XAI is using are turbines that were previously, you know, used often in like fracking for the oil and gas industry where they're sitting in the middle of nowhere and you can truck in a bunch of natural gas, put it in there and get a bunch of power online way quicker than you could waiting for a hookup to the grid. But they are, you know, natural gas turbines, therefore they're emitting pollution at the same time, which is less of an issue when you're in the middle of nowhere building a fracking setup, but a much bigger issue when you're in a city.

45:56And I want to get to this person you wrote about, Brent Mayo, but do we know why they picked this particular area and why they're so close to these, I guess, more dense or urbanly dense cities and towns? I can't speak today. Sure. No, because there were buildings ready for them. The first data center is in a former appliance factory that was sitting empty and had some connections to the grid that they could eventually build on. The second one was just a warehouse in an area with a bunch of other warehouses. So they could just show up and start putting stuff in. So tell me about Brent Mayo. How does he fit into the story?

46:37So he's kind of a person that could only exist in Elon Musk's universe because his job description is incredibly fluid. Uh, he spent, you know, a lot of his career pre-Elon working in oil rigs, uh, and oil and gas engineering in the Gulf of Mexico, the Middle East all around the world. Um, then he joined SpaceX in 2022 and moved to XAI last year when the company was starting to build its first data center in Memphis. Um, he was initially kind of a behind the scenes engineering type of guy, but he's gotten a lot more public as XAI has become a big story. You know, he's constantly meeting politicians, business leaders, community leaders to try to win support for XAI in the city.

47:21And why does Musk like him specifically? What is it about Mayo that Musk has taken a liking to? Well, he's the, you know, kind of person that thrives in Musk world, which is someone that's extremely energetic that you can just kind of throw at any problem and he'll work 24-7 toward it. You know, he's all about the Musk hardcore culture where you could get a call from the boss in the middle of the night or, you know, at any hour of the day and, you know, be super gung-ho about whatever he wants you to do. And he's also, you know, a pretty personable guy. I talk to plenty of people in Memphis, you know, politicians and activists who might not necessarily agree with him, who said that, you know, he's intense, but he's, you know, somewhat charming, even if you disagree with him.

48:06And tell me about, if we just zoom out a little bit, I mean, I imagine as all of these AI companies seek to ramp up their data center efforts, it's kind of interesting to think that, I mean, Musk has this guy. I don't know, maybe Sam Altman has his own person. You know, like, I feel like these sort of industrial characters must be getting more and more, I guess, they must be becoming more and more important to this story for all of these billionaires, especially that are trying to wrap this stuff up. Yeah, I mean, XAI is an extreme example. They are, you know, being especially aggressive and fast with building data centers, but Meta and OpenAI and other companies are also using natural gas turbines now, which used to be a huge no-no for basically all of them.

48:57But when they go into a city, AWS, Google, these are companies that have huge public relations departments and government affairs people that are slick and they wear suits and that's fully their job is dealing with communities and politicians. Mayo is obviously not that. I talked to people who were in this meeting with him and the mayor of Memphis and several other prominent locals where he shows up wearing a hoodie and he's dropping F-bombs and stuff. That's not what someone from AWS is going to do. They're going to be in a suit and they're going to be very professional. And did he talk to you for the story at all?

49:37No, unfortunately. If you did have an interview with him, what would you ask him? Based on the way he talks about working for Elon and, you know, the posts on his X feed, I would say, how much sleep do you get every night and how do you have so much energy? but i i mean riff with me here for a second i mean you know strategically i i i kind of wonder you know how he might think about the supercomputer strategy that xei is building out you know uh i almost wonder you know how he's thinking about like is it just faster faster faster that is you know the the competitive advantage or i don't know i i if i had him in front of me i might ask you know how are you building this data center to be different uh i don't know those i i wonder if those are questions that you talked about with the other people in his orbit at all.

50:25No, I think those are fair questions. I mean, the long-term strategy for XAI is pretty unclear. Like, they're throwing a bunch of money and a bunch of resources at these data centers, but I don't think they fully know how they're going to power them in the long-term, like, beyond, you know, the turbines that they're setting up right now. I think there are tons of questions about the long-term strategy that I'd love to ask him. Right, great. Right. Well, Theo, thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you for putting together that map with our graphics team, too. That was very helpful for those of us who are not familiar with that part of America.

51:02That is Theo Waite, our Elon Musk reporter at The Information. Okay. Well, OpenAI has made its hardware ambitions clear. And now a new story we published today at The Information reveals that Joni Ive is not the only Apple alumni that the company is going after hiring. OpenAI has been poaching other key hardware talent from Apple and is even talking to some of the same suppliers. I want to bring on Aaron Tilly, one of the reporters on that story, to talk more about what he's found. Aaron, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Hey, thanks for having me. So tell me about what you found in your reporting.

51:40Yeah, so we found that OpenAI has really been accelerating these hardware efforts. Obviously, it's on track to release an advice in the next year or so. And to do that, they've really engaged their Apple network. They hired Apple people to start this, and they're continuing to build out that team. And the network is all from Apple hardware teams. So they're really aggressively going after these folks, and it's a pretty easy job to kind of find these folks. They're very excited to move to open AI. It's an interesting opportunity. And yeah, they're finding an easy time poaching these folks. So it's been an easy sell to get them to come over.

52:28Yeah, it's been, I think from what I've spoken to folks. Because Apple's a great company to work for, I think, right? Oh yeah, it's stable. They don't lay off people like the rest of the tech world. I think it's a great place. But speaking with folks in sort of that hardware universe, I think a lot of people in hardware engineering at Apple have become a little uninspired and bored with sort of the rote work. They're doing the incremental sort of updates to the iPhones and Macs and Apple Watches. So I think this is quite exciting. this idea and i mean you know i wonder if your reporting told you anything about what kinds of hardware products open ai is trying to build because i mean there's been a lot of ideas thrown around did you did you sort of get any insight there yeah we heard a few things i mean i think primarily it it appears and and they've and in court documents they have acknowledged sort of a plan around a family of devices that they want to release.

53:39And there's a range of sort of form factors. They're looking at a smart speaker without a display. So obviously something like you could think like, you know, an Amazon Alexa-like device, smart glasses. We've heard as a talk about form factor, digital recorders. And are they going after talent that have experience building these types of products? Are they looking at it in terms of manufacturing? How are they, I guess, I'm not asking you who your sources are, but I'm asking, how do we sort of know this? Oh, I mean, I've spoken to people who've been in the lab. We have people in the supply chain, Gore-Tec in Luxshare, which are Apple suppliers, are working on these devices.

54:34So similar to like in the Apple world, there's a very, very large, complicated supply chain with a lot of folks, a lot of people in that chain. There's people now entering into and doing work with OpenAI here. Okay. You know, I want to get some sense from how important Joni Ive is to these conversations. It feels like maybe this is an easier sell because people are saying, well, look, I mean, we want to go work with a visionary. Is he a pretty big part of these discussions? Oh, for sure. Yeah. Involved very deeply in sort of the outreach and poaching, I think. And just, yeah, the draw of Johnny Ive.

55:16He is sort of the icon that brought Apple back from the brink with Steve Jobs in the late 90s. the deep partnership between those two made Apple into the companies today. And so, you know, just seeing him as that key piece of what made Apple, what used to make, you know, some of these people think what Apple used to be of Apple, he is a key part of that. Right. Talent is one side of the story. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about just how difficult it is, because a lot of companies have tried to do hardware. Of course, a lot of companies have not had Jody Ive by their side guiding them.

55:56But it doesn't strike me that this is a home run just if you can get a couple of great hardware engineers on board. I mean, we're talking a multi-year, multi-decade journey even for OpenAI. Totally, for sure. I mean, I think Silicon Valley is littered with former Apple hardware employees trying to do startups. I think it's like the trying to translate being at a big company like Apple with tons of resources surrounded by massive teams working on every element of a product to a smaller, more scrappy kind of environment. that's really difficult for a lot of folks because there's just so much that goes into hardware at every sort of layer that, you know, you just need a team that can execute is really challenging outside of Apple.

56:50So you just, there's been a lot of examples out there of sort of, yeah, Apple hardware folks with a good idea, but they just can't, they just can't bring it to life. Last question for you. You know, every great story comes with more questions and answers sometimes. What questions did this raise for you with respect to OpenAI's hardware strategy and what are you watching for? Yeah, I mean, primarily the thing I was thinking about a lot in this is, does the world need another device, especially an AI device? Like since, you know - We saw the glasses this week. I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, since the rise of ChatGPT, there's been a lot of, you know, AI devices, the humane AI pen.

57:41Yeah, there's been, there's, there's, there's just like, none of these have shown, I think, any sort of value or our purpose for consumers and have been complete flops for reviewers and consumer demand. So I think, is Johnny Ive, is he going to show us that there is a path forward? Does the world need an AI device because I'm not convinced. I think the smartphone is a perfectly fine kind of device to interact with AI, even your Mac. I mean, most people are just typing into a Safari browser their chat GPT prompts. They don't need a device to do this stuff. So I think that's the thing I'm thinking about, like how necessary is this?

58:24Yeah, and we just had Alex Kimmel on the show just a few minutes ago. And one of the questions I asked him was about, hey, with these glasses, I mean, isn't it distracting really? You make the argument that glasses allow you to be more present. And my point to him was, I actually think it adds distractions. And so I'm actually with you. I'm with you. And so I'm curious to see what they come out with. Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show. That is Aaron Tilly, our Apple reporter here at The Information. Well, that does it for today's show. A reminder that we are live on this stream Monday through Friday at 10 a.m.

58:59Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. I want to thank Amazon Web Services, who is our presenting sponsor for this production. And I want to thank you for tuning in. We really do appreciate your viewership. I am already excited for our next show on Monday. We've got a busy week planned for you, and so we will see you then. Until then, have a great weekend. Bye-bye for now.