Satya Nadella on Dwarkesh Patel: Why GitHub Copilot Leads AI

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

November 12, 2025

Duration

1h 28m

Channel

Dwarkesh Podcast

Watch on YouTube

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📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave me and Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter. Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters, each of which has hundreds of thousands of GB200s & GB300s. Between all these interconnected buildings, they’ll have over 2 GW of total capacity. Just to give a frame of reference, even a single one of these Fairwater buildings is more powerful than any other AI datacenter that currently exists. Satya then answered a bunch of questions about how Microsoft is preparing for AGI across all layers of the stack. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

• Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella-2
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/satya-nadella-how-microsoft-is-preparing-for-agi/id1516093381?i=1000736461892
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/290a568fldDQBrPhYOCZFK?si=71a120f868384ffd

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

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To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 - Fairwater 2 00:04:15 - Business models for AGI 00:13:42 - Copilot 00:20:56 - Whose margins will expand most? 00:37:12 - MAI 00:48:42 - The hyperscale business 01:03:39 - In-house chip & OpenAI partnership 01:10:30 - The CAPEX explosion 01:16:01 - Will the world trust US companies to lead AI?

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Satya Nadella

  guest

• Dwarkesh Patel

  host

• Scott Guthrie

  guest

• Dylan Patel

  guest

• Narrator

  other

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Satya Nadella and Dwarkesh Patel, Satya Nadella on Dwarkesh Patel: Why GitHub Copilot Leads AI explores Satya Nadella explains Microsoft’s long-game strategy in the AI race Satya Nadella discusses how Microsoft is repositioning itself from a pure software company to a capital‑ and knowledge‑intensive industrial player building massive AI data centers and infrastructure. He argues that long‑term value won’t accrue solely to model makers, but will be shared across infrastructure, “scaffolding” (tools, agents, control planes), and application layers like Office, GitHub, and Azure. Nadella outlines why Microsoft paused some U.S. capacity, focuses on fungible global infrastructure, and avoids being a single‑customer host for any one lab, even OpenAI. He also emphasizes sovereignty, trust in U.S. tech, and Microsoft’s bet on agents, multi‑model ecosystems, and its own MAI lab while deeply leveraging OpenAI’s models and system IP.

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