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- Daily Grind July 28, 2025: Chip startups take on Nvidia. Plus, Will AI Spur a New Energy Revolution?
Daily Grind July 28, 2025: Chip startups take on Nvidia. Plus, Will AI Spur a New Energy Revolution?
Welcome to Tech's morning newsletter, where you get one headline, one page of a great book, and one question to start your day.
Ben Putano
July 28, 2025
Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Grind for Monday, July 28.
AI is reshaping every aspect of our world, especially our most fundamental technology: energy.
Despite the rapid growth in AI capabilities over the last 3 years, our greatest bottleneck continues to be energy. AI needs a lot of it (to say the least) and it’s hurting our ability to innovate.
Companies are addressing the challenge in a number of ways, including at the hardware level. Let’s talk about new AI chipmakers and their fight to topple the world’s most valuable company:
📰 One Headline: Nvidia’s Facing Heat from New AI Chipmakers
In 1993, two Sun Microsystem engineers joined forces with an LSI Logic consultant to form Nvidia. Their aim was clear: to build a microchip for the growing demands of computer graphics.
That LSI consultant was Jensen Huang, who continues to leads the company 32 years later. Nvidia recently became the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of over $4 trillion.
Nvidia’s focus on graphics chips was perfectly timed, boosted by the booming gaming industry and consumer needs for clear picture and video.
When we entered the generative AI era in 2022, Nvidia discovered a new niche that propelled them to new heights: their graphics chips were surprisingly well-suited for training and running AI (or perhaps this was unsurprising, since the gaming industry has been a leading AI pioneer since the 1980s).
But by many accounts, the Nvidia chips are good—but not perfect—for AI, and new microchip startups see a potential opening.
By designing chips from the ground-up for AI—like Nvidia did for the graphics industry—they hope to topple the silicon goliath and power the AI future.
Popping the Cap Off Our Energy Bottleneck
One of the biggest concerns with generative AI is its energy consumption. According to the World Economic Forum (and reported by The Wall Street Journal), growth in energy demands is expected to remain at 50% every year until 2030. This level of growth is unsustainable—not just for the environment but for the AI industry.
Energy is proving to be the major bottleneck for innovation.
Some AI startups have already shut down due to the costs of energy demands. Replica—an AI startup that made headlines for building “conscious” NPC (non-player characters) into video games—shut down due to the costs of maintaining the AI-powered characters.
In a response to these insatiable energy demands, new chipmakers are designing systems that use a fraction of the energy as leading chips from Nvidia.
Positron, for example, is building a chip specifically designed to run AI inference, the process of creating responses to user prompts. Positron raise a $23.5 million seed round in February 2025 and is testing its chips with Cloudflare.
But we should not expect new chips to lower AI’s demand for energy, no matter how energy-efficient they are. History shows us that better chips will simply spur new, more powerful, energy-demanding AI models and applications.
That’s why the real solution must come from sustainable and nearly infinite new sources of energy: Nuclear and renewables.
We are at a crossroads—AI could either accelerate the pace of climate change, or it could spur a long-overdue green energy revolution. My hope—and belief—is that it will spur the latter.
🔗 A Few Good Links
The Baltimore Banner: Johns Hopkins University Press will license its authors’ books to train AI models
KCRW: Nearly 4,000 NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program
Go Deeper: White House works to ground NASA science missions before Congress can act (ArsTechnica)
NBC: Women are anonymously spilling tea about men in their cities on viral app
OM Malik: The Satya of Satya’s Layoff Memo
Diver Deeper: Satya Nadella’s Memo to Microsoft (Microsoft Blog)
📚 One Page: The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim
Nvidia is being challenged on all fronts, but we should not write off the chip giant as a slow-moving incumbent. They have a fierce, competitive culture that is well-suited to the AI wars.
In The Nvidia Way, Tae Kim paints a picture of a company modeled after Jensen Huang, its co-founder and CEO:
Nvidia’s unique culture might sound strange or unusually grueling, even for the tech industry. But among all the former Nvidia employees I talked to, it was hard to find a dissenter. They all reported that the company was largely free from the internal politics and indecisiveness typical in large organizations. They mentioned how difficult it was to adjust to working at other companies where direct, blunt communication is rare and there’s far less urgency to get things done. And they described how Nvidia not only empowered them, but also required them to fulfill their professional calling, as a necessary condition of employment.
In a sense, that is the Nvidia Way in its purest form. It is the unwavering belief that there is tremendous reward in doing your job the best you can. It is the drive to persevere amid adversity. Or, as Jensen put it when looking directly into my eyes: the secret to his company’s success is nothing more than “sheer will.”
MORE PRECISELY, IT IS JENSEN’S personal will that has shaped Nvidia. He has personally made the most consequential decisions in its history. His ability to place the right major bets on emerging technologies stems from his deep technical knowledge—a founder with an engineering background. I have tried in this book to distill the Nvidia Way down to a set of principles that anyone can learn from, if not use. But behind them all lurks a question: Can you really separate Nvidia from its CEO?
❓ One Question: What Improvements will I make this week from last week?
Every Monday, I spend time to complete an After Action Review, followed by planning.
One of the most important questions in this process is this:
What improvements will I make this week from last week?
One mistake I often make is over-planning my week, which leaves me feeling stressed and takes away from all I accomplished. This week, I’m trying to properly plan, given we are going on our babymoon starting Friday.
What about you? What improvements do you hope to make this week?
🗳️ Wrap Up and Feedback:
That’s it for this Monday! As always, I would love your feedback on today’s newsletter:
Talk to you tomorrow!
Cheers,
Ben