Satya Nadella: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so if the world grew at 10%, the world economy is $100 trillion or something, if the world grew at 10%, that's like an extra $10 trillion in value produced every single year. If that is the case, you as a hyperscaler... It seems like $80 billion is a lot of money. Shouldn't you be doing like $800 billion? If you really think in a couple of years, we could be really growing the world economy at this rate, and the key bottleneck would be: do you have the compute necessary to deploy these AIs to do all this work? That is correct. But by the way, the classic supply side is, "Hey, let me build it and they’ll come." That's an argument, and after all we've done that, we've taken enough risk to go do it. But at some point, the supply and demand have to map. That's why I'm tracking both sides of it. You can go off the rails completely when you are hyping yourself with the supply-side, versus really understanding how to translate that into real value to customers. That's why I look at my inference revenue. That's one of the reasons why even the disclosure on the inference revenue... It's interesting that not many people are talking about their real revenue, but to me, that is important as a governor for how you think about it. You're not going to say they have to symmetrically meet at any given point in time, but you need to have existence proof that you are able to parlay yesterday's, let’s call it capital, into today's demand, so that then you can again invest, maybe exponentially even, knowing that you're not going to be completely rate mismatched. I wonder if there's a contradiction in these two different viewpoints, because one of the things you've done wonderfully is make these early bets. You invested in OpenAI in 2019, even before there was Copilot and any applications. If you look at the Industrial Revolution, these 6%, 10% build-outs of railways and whatever things, many of those were not like, "We've got revenue from the tickets, and now we're going to..."…

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