RWA2026-10-01 04:58:20Theory Ventures founder says RWA crypto market is growing faster than AITheory Ventures founder Tomasz Tunguz said the world’s fastest-growing market is not AI but the crypto market built around on-chain real-world assets, or RWA. In his view, RWA is bringing stocks as well as commodities such as oil and copper onto blockchains, while also taking on much of the public price discovery process when commodity exchanges are closed. Tunguz said stock perpetual contracts are being used to provide pre-listing price signals for companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Cerebras, while also opening access to international users. He cited data showing that Cerebras’ pre-IPO perpetual price was within 1.3% of its Nasdaq opening price. For SpaceX, he said perpetual open interest stood at about $215 million and cumulative pre-listing trading volume reached roughly $2.2 billion. He also pointed to a September 2026 report from Pantera Capital, which said stock perpetuals on Hyperliquid and Lighter recorded $67.8 billion in June trading volume, or 16 times the spot volume of tokenized stocks. Tunguz added that stablecoins have become one of the top 10 buyers of U.S. Treasuries and are being used to settle these tokenized asset trades.440
AI2026-09-01 04:27:30VC Says Access, Not Price, Is the New Scarcity as Frontier AI Splits Into Closed CampsIn a post on X, venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz said the frontier AI market is splitting into closed camps, with labs choosing partners, cutting off rivals and rationing access to top models. He pointed to recent moves across partnerships, API cutoffs and model rationing as evidence. Salesforce has tapped Anthropic as its dedicated AI partner, making Claude the default model in the world's largest CRM and Slack. OpenAI cut Cursor's API access on Nov. 12 after SpaceX acquired Cursor. Z.ai has put its flagship model behind the security review of a host with cumulative revenue over $10 billion. Anthropic is rationing Mythos 5 via Project Glasswing and restricting Fable to U.S.-only inference. OpenAI is giving trusted partners early access to GPT-5.6 variants. On the investment side, Nvidia is backing open ecosystems with $13 billion for Hugging Face, $7 billion for Poolside and $26 billion for Nemotron. Tunguz argues that access, not price, is the new scarcity in frontier AI.1020
AI infrastruc2026-08-25 03:28:41Tomasz Tunguz says AI infrastructure bottlenecks are moving from GPUs to memory, CPUs and storageVenture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz said the AI infrastructure buildout is unfolding like a slow relay race, with bottlenecks passing from one layer of the hardware stack to the next. In his view, pressure first hit GPUs, then moved into memory, CPUs and storage, while each constrained link locked up downstream supply for years and reset cost baselines at higher levels. Tunguz pointed to several markers along that path: H100 rental prices rose above $9 an hour in early 2023, server shipments fell 22%, and later capacity shifts toward high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, pushed enterprise SSD prices up 80% in a single quarter while DRAM climbed more than 60%. He also said agent workloads could push the CPU-to-GPU ratio to about 1:1 by the end of 2025, lifting average server CPU prices 27% year over year, with nearline HDD capacity for 2026 already sold out. On the data center side, civil construction costs have reached about $20 billion per gigawatt, and orders for long-lead equipment such as transformers and turbines have been booked out to 2029 through 2031.1190
