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. 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 

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(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