a16z

The Machine Age Fund is a $1.1B vehicle from Andreessen Horowitz aimed at the physical layer of AI, spanning computer chips, memory, data centers, and robots. It targets founders building hardware and infrastructure, a shift for a firm best known for software bets, and lands at a moment when the fund is focused on hardware, bucking the firm's typical focus on the scalable economics of pure software . The launch matters because AI training and deployment are hitting supply chain and physics limits at every layer, from silicon to power, and capital has been slow to follow. The fund's mandate is unusually broad for a single vehicle. It covers the physical layer artificial intelligence runs on, from chips to the buildings that house them, taking in memory, networking and storage , plus full systems including data centers, robotics, and home AI appliances. a16z frames the moment as a rearchitecting of the compute stack down to the electricity, pointing to concrete pressure points like rack power moving from 5-10 kW toward 1 MW over the next three years and data center campuses scaling into the gigawatts. Recent hardware bets referenced by the firm include Unconventional AI, Nexthop, Volta, Atoms, and Mind Robotics, building on earlier checks into Skydio, SpaceX, Anduril, and Waymo. The fund is authored by Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, Raghu Raghuram, David Ulevitch, and David George, with hardware and infrastructure work led by partners including Guido Appenzeller (former CTO of Intel's Data Center Group), Shangda Xu, and Erin Price-Wright. For founders working on power, cooling, interconnects, edge devices, or robotic systems, the Machine Age Fund signals that a16z intends to run a dedicated hardware motion rather than treat these deals as one-offs, and it sits alongside the firm's American Dynamism practice covering U.S. manufacturing and industrial buildout.