Andreessen Horowitz has raised a $1.1B fund called Machine Age to invest in the hardware backbone of AI, from chips, memory, networking and storage to robotics.

The fund is a bet that the hard constraint on AI is no longer just models and data but the physical supply chain underneath them, the compute, memory and networking that have become the industry's tightest bottleneck. It slots alongside a16z's other infrastructure and Oxygen compute initiatives aimed at securing hardware access for its portfolio companies.

For crypto, the thesis rhymes with DePIN and on-chain AI: whoever controls compute, chips and networking capacity controls the pace of the AI buildout, and increasingly that hardware layer is where the biggest capital is now flowing.

The raise underscores how the AI arms race has shifted from software toward silicon and physical infrastructure, with top venture firms racing to fund the picks-and-shovels layer rather than just the applications on top.

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