微软CEO萨提亚·纳德拉谈AI前沿竞争、算力资本开支与生产力落地

Narration: has generated $250 billion with a B in market value for Microsoft. Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

Jason Calacanis: Since you've been the CEO, three and a half years, the stock is up about uh I guess it's about 120%. I'm good for my 80 billion. I am going to spend $80 billion building out Azure. Maybe after the industrial revolution, this is the biggest thing. That's our goal with our frontier model. Our model should be the best model that they can use as a base. We create technology so that others can create more technology. That's who we are. We're tool maker. Please welcome Satya Nadella.

Satya Nadella: All right.

Jason Calacanis: Hi guy. Good to see you coming out.

Satya Nadella: Good to see you.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Good morning guys.

Jason Calacanis: How are you?

Satya Nadella: Good.

Jason Calacanis: Thanks for joining us.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Crazy weekend, but here we are. Do we need to pace the frontier? [laughter]

Satya Nadella: So, let's start with the common sense part first, which is we should do what it takes to build stuff that serves humanity first and is in human control. You know, it's kind of crazy that we have to start with that level of common sense, but I think it's a good place. Then when I think about pacing whatever the first thing that at least I believe is the broad diffusion of this technology is the most critical thing because the benefits of this tech showing up everywhere is really what's all about right so at the end of the day if you sort of say serving humanity let it actually reach humanity in ways that it serves humanity and that means you got to have choice you have to have competition. You have to have all kinds of business models whether they're open weights, close weights, what have you. Then the other aspect I think that is not talked about when we talk about control is actually the control that for example customers have, enterprises or businesses have around this technology because sometimes this is so opaque, right? I want my privacy. I want to be able to embed my knowledge in a set of weights without those weights leaking. I want to have control over my data, my inferences, and my systems. So that's how I think about control in a real, practical sense.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Were you were you surprised though when both the essay landed and then it seemed like there was a circling of the wagons?

Satya Nadella: I I think that it comes my my suspicion is it comes genuinely from this place where when you start seeing in fact it's not even surprising when you see what these systems are capable of doing.

Chamath Palihapitiya: right right or these API keys

Satya Nadella: or an API keys or yeah exactly there's no monitoring uh there's internet access there's sort of classic I would call it software engineering hygiene. When you give a model an objective and there are no guardrails, no audit trails, and no isolation, it will find shortcuts. If you look at it from computer science and systems architecture, the solution is not mystical fear, but good old engineering principles like deterministic verification, access control, and runtime monitoring.

David Friedberg: and so what is the way to do that I would say oh go build a maybe a causal model like a semantic model that actually checks what actions are being executed.

Satya Nadella: I I mean I I buy the argument that we do not understand the latent space. Uh right other than I thought you know as you scale, you see emergent properties. But we can add determinism and explainability through structured approaches like chain of thought.

David Friedberg: chain of thought

Satya Nadella: chain of thought and so then you can really go look at it deeply in fact you can have multiple models uh and you can look at the reasoning paths and cross-validate them.

David Sacks: Satya you've worked with you've worked with technologists for decades uh and when you see as a leader of one company Microsoft, looking at how these frontier labs debate safety and control, how do you view the culture and approach?

Satya Nadella: Yeah. you know, it's it's hard for me to speak to what's happening in any of these places, but let let's just say uh how we I grew up even inside of Microsoft and how we approach complex systems engineering.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah.

Satya Nadella: Right. I mean, that's kind of like 101, right? Which is why you're faced, you're like, you know, you have a bug. Um what do you do? do you stop uh and go find the root cause? You look at stack traces, memory dumps, and logs. In building large models and agentic systems, you cannot panic over probabilistic outputs; you must construct verifiable chains of evidence.

Chamath Palihapitiya: evidence

Satya Nadella: evidence and so everything has got to be auditable. uh and then every object it access, right? If it goes and gets a secret, oh, it's going to go chain actions, it must be logged, sandboxed, and authorized.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah.

Satya Nadella: Thanks.

David Friedberg: So I think I think that's a great point. I love how you uh differentiated in the HuggingFace uh episode between the mundane things they got wrong like basic permissions versus fundamental breakthroughs, and how broad diffusion needs both real science and scalable product form factors.

Satya Nadella: Uh and so I think that yes, so there's some science, there is some form factor that then leads to broad diffusion and we now need to find the next level of system paradigm to embed it reliably into the real economy.

David Friedberg: I think that's a good segue.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Sorry. Let me just ask one question to connect the um economic incentive argument on what's going on. The argument is the Frontier Labs are facing token deflation and open-source models are compressing margins.

David Friedberg: um

Satya Nadella: Yeah, I think the the fundamental thing that I think we're observing is good old-fashioned competition, right? I mean, for me, if I look back at it, we had a great closed source product called SQL Server. What was the check against it? there was always a substitute called Postgres or MySQL. So competition keeps everyone honest and expands the pie.

Satya Nadella: such that we can use multiple models. In fact, it's better for them. In fact I worked on Windows interoperability with Unix first.

Satya Nadella: In fact, it was counterintuitive, right? We used to think, oh my god, this interoperability means we'll be less used except we were more used.

Satya Nadella: In fact, we became weirdly enough because there were so many variants of Unix at that time that Windows interoperability made Unix better and Windows better. The same applies to models today: supporting both open and proprietary models creates the healthiest platform.

David Friedberg: Yeah, it's a great it's a great point. I mean, I think this is the real question which is how do we truly see this in the productivity stats? How do we see GDP growth from this?

Satya Nadella: or supply side. Um I mean the the one example that I I love and I get back to in fact healthcare is a good one right if you think about health care, clinicians spend enormous time on documentation. If AI handles clinical notes and workflow overhead, providers can focus on patient care.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, absolutely. We see that and and by the way even in in simple co-pilot cases, right, which is if you look at how people work, it's not just drafting text, it's stripping away friction.

Satya Nadella: uh what if uh even just these workflows that are taking away time from things that you could be spending time on were automated, freeing you for higher leverage work.

Jason Calacanis: okay well you're bringing up this great point if you go all the way back to like the turn of the century the industrial revolution when we went from six days to five days. And so what happens is as productivity boosts come in, human work steps back and you kind of accomplish the same amount of work. Do you think that that happens here? Is that is there a risk that we have a three-day work week and we're just still growing at two and a half%?

Satya Nadella: Yeah.

Satya Nadella: Right. So, so that I think is what is needed, right? Which is in order for all of this to play out quite frankly, we do need to see real acceleration in economic output and transformative new industries.

Jason Calacanis: What's the what business is Microsoft in in relation to AI? Obviously, Azure has been crushing it. you're turning away customers uh and you're doing $80 billion in capex.

Jason Calacanis: No, but what's the business here? What's the

Jason Calacanis: Do you need to have a frontier model?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Did Did we tell you there was one journalist on the panel? [laughter]

Jason Calacanis: No, no, no. It's I mean I mean it sincerely because I'm just curious. You're a great strategist. We know that about you. Microsoft missed mobile. Is Microsoft going to miss the AI revolution? You don't have a frontier model? Because I always found it perplexing that you didn't. And what's the strategy?

Satya Nadella: Yeah. So, let me walk you uh through the sort of where we are and what we're up to on each of these. By the way, on the capex side and the buildout side, every dollar is tied to measurable workload demand. When we talk about the market as defined, there are maybe 250 to 300 million real enterprise knowledge workers, where we have unmatched presence and trust.

Jason Calacanis: oh wow

Satya Nadella: right So when we talk like the market quote unquote as defined is maybe 300 uh 250 even of real enterprise users and of that we've got the penetration. Enterprise customers care about the complete solution: data governance, identity, compliance, and multi-model flexibility across OpenAI, open source, or custom models.

Jason Calacanis: Right.

Satya Nadella: Right. That's so so my fundamental enterprise architecture would say you should have a model system that fundamentally allows you to route to the best model dynamically for cost, latency, and capability. Microsoft is the enterprise intelligence platform.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Just to build on Jason's question you had this um incredible moment I think we put it here where you said you know we're good for our 80 billion. But looking at capex, the kit—the racks, the chips, the networking—represents 60% or more of the cost.

Satya Nadella: the kit means the racks the chips

Chamath Palihapitiya: the racks the chips and what have you and that's 60% of the cost or what have you right so therefore so what we do is we go build as much infrastructure as possible.

Satya Nadella: yeah what's happening is the workloads that are now at scale uh they obviously grew up from what GPUs were there but now the the shape is so well understood.

Chamath Palihapitiya: um and saying well you know there are these multiple phases in um an inference or a training phase so why not build silicon that's optimized for these stages and bring down costs?

Satya Nadella: quite drastically

Satya Nadella: um and so I think that there is going to be a lot more choice even there in that layer. So ours we have Jensen's stuff which is I think our primary foundation, but we also build Maia custom silicon and support AMD, giving us ultimate flexibility and cost efficiency.

Jason Calacanis: Sax I want to let you get in here before we run out of time.

David Sacks: Yeah. So you know we've heard now from the the various frontier lab leaders Sam, Dario, Elon, Demis that we need to prioritize alignment and safety. But other global competitors are pushing full speed ahead without those constraints.

Satya Nadella: uh it's not as if uh they don't want to make sure that their citizens um are benefiting from AI just like we will want our citizens to benefit from AI. Technology naturally diffuses globally.

David Sacks: Well that's you use the word idiosyncratic and I think that is the right word is I don't think we know yet how this global policy and competition dynamic plays out.

Satya Nadella: It's a great question

Satya Nadella: and if they do then presumably they'd want to act on it as well. Yeah, I I just feel my my take there is that we are ahead.

Satya Nadella: and we are who we are which is we argue we sort of we compete uh we are more transparent which is all by the way virtues as far as I'm concerned so that open competition is our greatest strength.

David Friedberg: what do you think we should be doing that we're not doing and what are you doing at Microsoft to change the narrative the populist sentiment that we have right now around AI?

Satya Nadella: etc. So, so to me I think this is I am squarely focused on one of the to answering Chamath's question from earlier which is whom is it benefiting and going back to the local impact, like our investment in Racine, Wisconsin.

Satya Nadella: Uh we have two and most people say, "Oh, there not that many jobs." In fact, there have been 1,200 construction jobs in that region all through that multi-year buildout.

Jason Calacanis: And how big, how big is that data center?

Satya Nadella: Uh I think it's now going to be at least 4 or 500 megawatt

Satya Nadella: and it sort of will keep expanding.

Satya Nadella: Um and so so these are uh so that's a real like that community. So earning it like just not saying hey these are all the benefits but seeing tangible local economic growth.

David Friedberg: but how do you get people to tell that story because that's what's missing today is those stories aren't being organically told and if a Microsoft executive says it, it sounds like PR.

Satya Nadella: Yeah. No I don't think Yeah. So I think storytelling is one thing. The other one is I think we just need more people outside of the tech industry to stand up and speak from their own lived experience.

Jason Calacanis: It's a new muscle.

Satya Nadella: It's a new muscle. It's a new muscle.

Jason Calacanis: So I think you're a good spokesperson to flex that muscle. I hope you do it more. Thank you for being with us.

Satya Nadella: Thank you so much.

Jason Calacanis: We appreciate you. [music]

Chamath Palihapitiya: Thank you, sir. Appreciate your time.