Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds...

a16z on X: "Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they now face the opposite problem: "It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, just a… / X

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Ben Horowitz on the lesson LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they now face the opposite problem: "It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down easily. And so if you look at LoudCloud, just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us." "In 1999, bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it. It was very hard to get it. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001, it was $50 a megabit... And if you borrowed money to get it, you're dead." "That kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur." "I think the core dynamic of AI has been working for CoreWeave, though, in that there's a massive shortage, not an overage of supply... Token prices have gone down, but GPU prices have not." "And by the way, data center space is going up in price because even labor to build data centers is hard. The politics are making it hard to build data centers. So the whole supply chain price is going up and demand is not subsiding." "Those are very big tailwinds for CoreWeave, despite the fact that the debt markets, kind of independent of them, are tough."

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3:03 PM · Oct 17, 2026

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