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Sourcery with Molly O'SheaSourcery with Molly O'Shea

BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum

Tony Kim is Managing Director and Head of the Global Technology Team within Fundamental Equities at BlackRock.

Molly O'SheahostTony KimguestMolly O'Sheahost
Jul 24, 20261h 8mWatch on YouTube ↗

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Episode Details

EPISODE INFO

Released
July 24, 2026
Duration
1h 8m
Channel
Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Watch on YouTube
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EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Tony Kim is Managing Director and Head of the Global Technology Team within Fundamental Equities at BlackRock. Recorded at the RAISE Summit in Paris, where Tony spoke on 4 panels, next-gen accelerators with d-Matrix, quantum computing with PsiQuantum, optics in data center design with Lumentum, and XPU and AI chip co-design with Broadcom. Tony breaks down the shift from a software-centric world to a compute-centric one, and why roughly $1 trillion of CapEx this year, and $10 trillion over the next 5 years, is being spent to move data centimeters and millimeters. He maps the market cap transformation, roughly $10 trillion in software, services, and internet, $20 trillion in Mag 7, and $30 trillion in non-Mag 7 chips and hardware. We cover the RAMpocalypse and why memory intensity is skyrocketing as AI models start to mirror the human brain, the 3 to 4 year duration mismatch between fab buildouts and today's demand, and the move from copper to light inside the data center. Tony also lays out his capital allocation framework, 90% in the 3-year AI vortex and the rest on frontier bets like quantum, orbital data centers, SMRs, and 800-volt power architectures, all converging on 2030. Plus, the coming wave of 30 to 40 Chinese robotics IPOs, mixing Chinese robot bodies with Western brains, his contrarian case for social robots addressing loneliness and aging populations, token flow as the new enterprise framework, and the mentors who shaped his career. We cover: › Why AI is forcing a complete rebuild of data centers › The shift from software to compute › Why memory becomes the next critical bottleneck › The future of AI chip co-design › How investors should think about AI infrastructure › Quantum, orbital data centers and the road to 2030 › Why robotics could become AI's next trillion-dollar market › China's robotics advantage › The enterprise AI stack and "token flow" › How BlackRock evaluates long-term technology investments Tony Kim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-kim-3150053/ Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/blackrocks-tony-kim-the-%2410-trillion-ai/id1738124704?i=1000778182752 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/38fsnkYSliGJvVO9Cuh7LS?si=O3z7skIMQuqORtnizJxPJw 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery

• MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai

• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio. Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Tony Kim, Head of BlackRock Fundamental Equities Global Technology (01:10) Secret Location, Croissants, and the RAISE Summit (03:52) Why Compute now rules everything (05:17) Why old data centers can't survive AI (07:43) Why data centers are ditching Copper for Light (10:44) The shortage nobody saw coming: RAM (15:20) Only three companies control memory (16:03) Tony's Playbook for Investing in the AI Era (18:16) The 20-year lie: "Compute is just a Commodity" (22:38) How Hardware quietly became bigger than Software (27:49) The Investing Rule: Will you still be cool in 5 years? (32:41) 2030: the year every frontier technology bet converges (38:16) Chips were never a Commodity (41:30) Rack design, materials science, and the physical-world renaissance (43:30) Inside the architecture of a Robot's mind (45:03) Why China Is winning the Robotics race (47:37) Why the biggest Robotics market might be companionship (51:34) Speech models are growing faster than anyone expected (53:07) "Token Flow": Tony's Framework for the Future Enterprise (57:56) Are PE roll-ups the next big AI disruption play? (1:00:48) What Could Go Right (and Wrong) in AI This Year (1:03:51) The mentors who shaped Tony Kim's worldview

SPEAKERS

  • Molly O'Shea

    host

    Host of Sourcery with Molly O'Shea, interviewing tech and AI leaders and reading show sponsor segments.

  • Tony Kim

    guest

    BlackRock global technology investment leader discussing AI infrastructure themes such as chips, memory, robotics, and quantum.

  • Molly O'Shea

    host

    Host of Sourcery with Molly O'Shea, handling closing questions, sponsor reads, and episode outros.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Sourcery with Molly O'Shea, featuring Molly O'Shea and Tony Kim, BlackRock's Tony Kim on AI's Next Winners? Chips, Memory, Robotics & Quantum explores AI flips value to compute: data centers, memory, robotics, 2030 Tony Kim argues AI has flipped tech from software-centric value capture to compute- and hardware-centric economics, forcing investors to “rethink everything.”

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