On August 28, 2026, Andreessen Horowitz announced the Machine Age Fund, a $1.1 billion vehicle dedicated to the physical infrastructure that AI runs on. The stated scope is unusually wide for a venture fund: chips, memory, networking and storage, plus full systems from data centers to robotics to home AI appliances, and further down into cooling, materials, electrical infrastructure and the real estate buildout itself. The fund is led by Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, Raghu Raghuram, David Ulevitch and David George.
The firm’s argument for the fund is an argument about physics catching up with software. It cites a 28x increase in compute density from an H100 to a Rubin rack, rack power moving from 5 to 10 kilowatts to 100 to 250 kilowatts and heading toward 1 megawatt within three years, and data center scale expanding from tens of megawatts to hundreds and in some cases to gigawatt scale. The firm also disclosed that hardware startups now make up over 20 percent of its deal flow, a striking shift for a partnership built on software economics.
The framing in the announcement is that this is “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rearchitect” the AI stack “all the way down to the electricity,” and that machine intelligence is “going vertical.”
For an investor or an operator, the signal is where the risk capital is rotating. A dedicated hardware fund from a firm historically associated with software is a bet that the returns over the next cycle sit in the constrained layers - silicon, interconnect, cooling and power - rather than in the application layer built on top of them.