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epgoodwinjr's avatar

Great piece, Dave. One near-term lever you didn’t mention: wide-band-gap silicon-carbide (SiC) power electronics.

• ~30-40 % of a rack’s load is overhead: AC-DC rectifiers, DC-DC converters, pumps, fans, UPS. Swapping legacy silicon switches for SiC lifts those stages from ~96 % to ~99 % efficiency, eliminating 70-100 W of waste heat for every 10 kW GPU node and cutting site PUE by ~8-12 % with <18-month payback.

• SiC ceramics as heat-spreaders/lids add ~2× thermal conductivity vs. today’s AlN, dropping GPU junction temps by 3-5 °C. Free head-room for those 1 kW Blackwells.

• It’s shipping (automotive volumes today, datacenter retrofit kits rolling out this year) so operators can buy time while photonics, analog in-memory, and neuromorphic chips mature.

SiC won’t replace Nvidia’s silicon logic, but it shrinks the thermal tax that threatens to stall AI build-outs right now- a practical bridge between overheated GPUs and the “post-GPU” future you outline.

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Dave Friedman's avatar

Thanks. Super interesting comment. I actually had not heard of wide-band-gap SiC before. I will have to dig into it. Appreciate the information!

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ET's avatar

Another one is Gallium Nitride or GaN which’s even better as you see NVIDIA is looking to test some GaN components with Navitas

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Pramodh Mallipatna's avatar

Love the analysis.

In addition, it will be interesting to see how the cost curve changes. Right now I feel the software layer has little to no margin to make money as all the profits are with Nvidia. That has to shift a bit too. Sharing my article on the economics of it, primarily saddled by gpu costs

Tokenomics

https://open.substack.com/pub/pramodhmallipatna/p/the-token-economy

Private Model Econmics

https://open.substack.com/pub/pramodhmallipatna/p/private-model-economics-for-enterprise

Agent Economics

https://open.substack.com/pub/pramodhmallipatna/p/the-economics-of-ai-agents-a-high

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Chris Bolger's avatar

Forced Physics DCT has a simple solution.

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Ken Kovar's avatar

Nvidia needs to go quantum dude 😎

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