Inference Will Be $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Software Investors are F***ed | Naveen Rao
Oct 24, 2026 · 1:13:26
Naveen Rao, founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, argues that energy will be AI's biggest bottleneck and that the inference market will reach $10 trillion within 10 years. He explains that physical efficiency gains have stalled, so value comes from co-designing model, architecture, and hardware—why chips will not commoditize and Nvidia keeps the margin. He tells Harry Stebbings that pure software investors are 'kind of fucked' as SaaS fragments, with AI-plus-human outcome delivery replacing it, and that the bottleneck has shifted from creation to verification. Rao predicts robotics will be 100x bigger than agentic coding, open models will carry 80% of token traffic, and traditional VC metrics like market validation no longer fit deep tech.
