Google and Cisco Execs: The Infrastructure Renaissance AI is causing the biggest buildout of physical infrastructure in modern history. The five largest players alone are projected to spend 342 billion on capex in 2025, more than the entire Apollo moon landing program adjusted for inflation. In this episode from a16z’s Runtime conference, General Partner Raghu Raghuram sits down with Google AI infra lead Amin Vahdat and Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel to discuss the unprecedented scale of what’s happening, how data centers will transform over time as AI inference, RL, and distributed computing become more prevalent, and why we’re still in the very earliest phase of the capex supercycle. 00:00 Intro 01:16 The scale of the AI buildout 05:56 Scarcity and global power constraints 12:18 The next wave in processor innovation 16:14 Networking evolution, scale challenges 21:00 Inference architecture 27:30 Rewiring culture around rapid AI adoption 31:55 Future of AI models, agents, media @raghuraghuram @jpatel41(a16z)