[Exclusive Interview] Plug and Play Chairman Amidi: "Independent AI Foundation Must Be Linked to Global Infrastructure"...Reveals Groq Investment Story for the First Time

The AI revolution has greater impact than the internet and smartphones
A bubble exists in parts... but more unicorns will emerge
Decided to bet on Groq three years ago
An independent AI foundation is possible
Connections to global data centers are essential

Saeed Amidi, Chairman of Plug and Play. Plug and Play

"If I were Korea's Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy or Minister of Science and ICT, I would also want Korea to have its own independent AI ecosystem. But connections to global infrastructure, such as data centers and cloud, are essential. I believe Korea first needs to learn from Silicon Valley's AI ecosystem."

On February 23 (local time), Saied Amidi, who founded Plug and Play, the world's largest accelerator (venture capital), offered this advice in an interview with The Asia Business Daily. Amidi is regarded as a living witness who helped build the investment ecosystem from the very early days of Silicon Valley. He is especially famous for having discovered some of the hottest AI unicorns, from Logitech, Google, and PayPal to Turing, Jamma, and Honey.

Amidi once again drew public attention last year when NVIDIA acquired Groq for 20 billion dollars (about 29 trillion won) in the form of a licensing deal. Plug and Play had made a big bet on Groq three years earlier. In the 1990s, Amidi sensed that the internet would greatly change the world; this time, foreseeing the AI era, he poured massive capital into Groq, and it took only a few years for that bet to pay off. "The AI revolution has a greater impact than the 'internet revolution' or the 'smartphone revolution.' This is a very important moment," Amidi stressed.

This was his first formal interview with The Asia Business Daily, and it was also the first time he publicly discussed the Groq investment story. The following is a Q&A from the conversation.

An independent AI foundation is possible... but connecting to global infrastructure such as data centers is crucial

Yonhap News Agency

-What do you think about the Korean government's active push to foster an 'independent AI foundation model'?

▶I always look at what is happening now through the lens of history. Samsung Electronics has done an incredible job in the semiconductor industry. Korea is a country with strong engineering capabilities. I believe Korea can build its own LLM and succeed with it. However, to run the "brain" that is the LLM, you first need to secure infrastructure. That means you have to think in terms of data centers and cloud. Today, the players with the largest cloud infrastructures in the world are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft (MS) Cloud.

Samsung or Naver can also build their own cloud. I am not saying they cannot. I simply want to emphasize that even if they do, Silicon Valley will still remain the global center of AI technology. This does not mean that each country cannot have its own LLM or local AI companies; it means that connections to global infrastructure are indispensable.

Even if I were Korea's Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy or Minister of Science and ICT, I would want Korea to have its own independent AI ecosystem. But Korea must first learn from Silicon Valley's AI ecosystem. I do not mean simply copying it. I mean absorbing its business mechanisms. Korea differs from the United States in how businesses are run, how networking and sales are done, and in the speed of innovation that comes from learning from failure. This is a very important aspect.

The AI revolution has greater impact than the internet and mobile revolutions

Unicorn companies invested in by Plug and Play: Turing, Honey, FiscalNote (clockwise from the top).

-What is your overall outlook on the AI industry?

▶AI has a greater impact than the internet revolution or the mobile (smartphone) revolution. I feel that more than 50% of the code at Microsoft and Google is now written by AI. We see AI as an enabler that helps make software better, faster, and cheaper. I believe AI will transform every industry: finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and more.

-There are also debates that AI companies are in a 'bubble.'

▶I think the valuations of some companies are indeed a bubble. But I also believe that going forward, there will be at least 100 companies across all sectors that will become unicorns. We will see incredible unicorn winners emerge in a wide range of fields, including pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance, and manufacturing. Recently, we reviewed investments in 13 AI startups. We expect 10 of these startups to become unicorns.

-In recent years, Plug and Play has increased its AI investments. Is that because you have an optimistic outlook on the AI industry?

▶Plug and Play has now invested in 580 startups in the AI field. We have invested in what we call the "foundation" or "hardware" layer, such as data centers, as well as in large language models (LLMs). The next stage is companies we call "Agentic AI." What I am watching closely are application-focused AI specialists that consume far less power and compute faster than Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Anthropic's Claude, while solving very specific problems. Once again, personally, I believe we are still at the starting phase of the AI revolution.

-How do you assess AI agent companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic?

▶Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all extraordinary, but personally I rate Anthropic Claude very highly.

Groq can become a big tech company even with just a 3% market share

An AI chip developed by Grok. It delivers inference speeds tens of times faster than existing AI chips.

-We heard you invested in Groq, which was acquired by NVIDIA. Tell us the story behind that investment.

▶For several years I had been looking at NVIDIA's corporate value and thinking it would be good to include the semiconductor segment (AI chips) in our investment portfolio. At the time, the market saw NVIDIA merely as a seller of GPUs for gaming. We already recognized that NVIDIA had transformed itself into an "AI chip company." In particular, three to four years ago, we heard rumors that NVIDIA wanted to acquire Groq. So I asked the head of technology at Plug and Play to look into Groq. The outlook for the semiconductor industry and the technology capabilities of Groq, the company we were considering investing in, were all evaluated as excellent.

Then in 2023, I attended the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Saudi Arabia. Around the same time, Groq CEO Jonathan Ross was also visiting Saudi Arabia. Through his close associate Mohsen Moazemi, he was introduced to Abdullah Alswaha, Saudi Arabia's Minister of Communications and Information Technology. When Minister Alswaha invited me, the Groq CEO, and others to a dinner, I met him for the first time. My first impression was that he looked very much like a "straight-A student" type. He was the kind of classic engineer I like. As we talked about AI, I became even more interested and told him I wanted to invest in his company.

I did not know whether an investment would even be possible. Groq was already a unicorn valued at 1 billion dollars (about 1.45 trillion won), and it was not really in need of additional capital. When Groq raised funds again, its valuation had risen to 2 billion dollars (about 2.9 trillion won). At that point, CEO Ross said he was bringing in new investors, and I decided to invest. Saudi Aramco invested alongside us at that time.

-A corporate value of 2 trillion won sounds like a heavy valuation burden.

▶We visited Groq's office and research lab in person. We felt that this was the moment when a new challenger could wedge its way into the market. Intel had lost its way (in effect, it had fallen behind in the AI chip race), and AMD was doing well and gaining market share. It was also attractive that Groq was performing a different type of computation from NVIDIA. Taking all this into account, we believed that even if Groq captured only 3-5% of market share, it could become a big tech company. That is exactly what is happening now.

-From an investor's standpoint, what do you think of the price NVIDIA paid to acquire Groq?

▶From the perspective of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, 20 billion dollars is not expensive. This acquisition is a kind of insurance policy. He likely judged that it was better to have Groq's solutions within NVIDIA's portfolio in case they grow significantly. In my view, 20 billion dollars is a big number in itself, but not when compared with NVIDIA's market capitalization. And NVIDIA is also a software company. There is also an aspect of using its dominance to grow the entire ecosystem.

Federal Reserve (Fed). Reuters, Yonhap News Agency

-It seems that if the Chair of the Federal Reserve (Fed) changes, the investment landscape will also change. How do you assess the investment environment, including interest rates?

▶I only focus on what I can control. The president or the Fed Chair are not within my control. I simply pay close attention to the philosophy of the next Fed Chair. One of the startups in our investment portfolio is called FiscalNote. It uses AI to analyze laws in Washington, D.C., explain how regulations are changing, and advise you on how to act under the new regulatory environment. In other words, we are focusing on the parts we can control through the companies we invest in.

Silicon Valley = Reporter Hwang Yoonjoo