Andreessen Horowitz has launched a $1.1 billion Machine Age Fund dedicated to investing in the physical infrastructure required to support the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence.
The fund represents the venture capital firm’s first vehicle specifically focused on hardware infrastructure and will target companies building technologies across AI chips, data storage, networking, data centers, power infrastructure, robotics and other components of the emerging AI computing stack.
Andreessen Horowitz is positioning the Machine Age Fund around the view that the current AI transition will require a fundamental rebuilding of computing infrastructure.
While much of the early investment surrounding generative AI has focused on models and software applications, increasingly large workloads require substantial investments across semiconductors, servers, networking equipment, energy systems and physical data center capacity.
The $1.1 billion fund gives Andreessen Horowitz dedicated capital to back founders addressing those infrastructure bottlenecks.
General Partner David George said previous major transitions in computing have required the infrastructure underneath them to be rebuilt, but the scale and speed of the current transition are significantly larger.
Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Erik Torenberg similarly described the fund as an effort to support founders rebuilding AI’s physical infrastructure from the ground up.
The firm’s strategy extends beyond chips themselves.
AI clusters require high-performance networking to connect processors, storage systems capable of moving enormous datasets, increasingly sophisticated cooling and power infrastructure and new data center architectures capable of supporting dense computing environments.
Robotics represents another component of the strategy as advances in AI models create opportunities to bring increasingly capable intelligence into physical machines.
Andreessen Horowitz also plans to use its existing go-to-market, recruiting and marketing infrastructure to help hardware-focused portfolio companies scale.
The Machine Age Fund provides the firm with a dedicated investment vehicle for companies operating across what could become one of the most capital-intensive technology buildouts in computing history.
“Every time computing shifts, the infrastructure underneath gets rebuilt. What’s different now is the size of it. We’ve never seen a compute transition this big move this fast.”
David George, General Partner At Andreessen Horowitz
“Every major shift in computing has needed a physical rebuild underneath it, such as new chips, new data centers, new power. This one is bigger and faster than anything before it.”
Erik Torenberg, General Partner At Andreessen Horowitz
