The Morning Download: Everything Will Be Computable

Here's what's up for Jan. 21, 2026.

• Nvidia invests $150 million in AI inference startup Baseten
• Andreessen Partner: No AI bubble
• Workers diverge from the Davos set on AI attitudes

Good morning. The world is headed into an era when almost everything will be computable, thanks to ongoing innovation in AI, classical and quantum computing, according to Pat Gelsinger. The former Intel CEO views that so-called trinity as the foundation for coming breakthroughs in materials science, medicine and more.

Gelsinger recently shared his vision with me, and how he views his role at venture capital firm Playground Global as a catalyst for such change.

It won’t be a quick transition. Gelsinger says the timeline for this evolution stretches out over two decades. It may not be benign, either. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei predicted a future in which artificial intelligence will spur significant economic growth—but could lead to widespread unemployment and inequality. He’s both “excited and worried” about the impact of AI, he said in an interview at Davos Tuesday with Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.

And as CEOs embrace the value of AI adoption for their companies, there’s evidence that rank-and-file workers can find it underwhelming.

Does your company anticipate a future in which almost all problems are computable, and how is it preparing? Use the links at the end of this newsletter and let us know.

I sat down for lunch recently with Gelsinger, who is settling into a new life as general partner at deep tech-focused venture capital firm Playground Global. Here are edited highlights of our conversation.

WSJ Leadership Institute: Are we in an AI investment bubble and if so, what kind?

Gelsinger: Of course we are. We're near all-time high multiples. We see crazy business models emerging, round-tripping of revenues... But that said, the upper and lower bounds of that bubble to me are pretty declarative. What do I mean by that? On the lower side... cloud, AI companies have real revenue, real balance sheets. And on the other side, on the upper side, we're fundamentally energy limited. How much is energy capacity increasing in the United States this year? One and a half percent. I'm not going to build a new data center if I can't get power. So essentially I have these big guardrails. I'm not particularly worried about it because of that upper and lower bound, real companies, real balance sheets and fundamentally, we're energy limited.

The single most powerful way for us to put more energy capacity into the grid is nuclear. The problem is the regulatory requirements generally make those seven and 10 year projects. So, can you accelerate the ability for that to become three and four or five year projects? … Having the government step into that, to me, is good and helpful.

WSJLI: How is AI going to evolve in the foreseeable future?

Gelsinger: We see the trinity of computing. Classical computing ….  AI computing, and then the third of the trinity, quantum. By the end of this decade, we will have usable, commercially viable, broadly demonstrable quantum computing. When you look at the panoply of algorithmic domains between classical, AI, and quantum, there is very little that cannot be computed, which is a pretty phenomenal statement. So our ability to essentially bring science to things that today are guessing, intuition …. [in] material science, biology, chemistry, all of those come on the table for the first time.

Imagine that you and I could make a better magnet... There's about 10,000 potential materials for magnets. We've analyzed in wet labs about 100 of the 10,000 possible ones... because you and I, we're great ferroelectric engineers. Now we go to the lab... we both had intuitions and experiences. We couldn't simulate 10,000. We picked the couple that we thought might be useful... Imagine we can simulate the other 9,900, and pick the right ones … to create better magnets... Imagine we can now compute things in chemistry that couldn't be computed before. That's why I say this is thrilling.

WSJLI: How do you handicap the effort to build a domestic technology supply chain in the U.S.?

Gelsinger: Supply chains don't move if you're equal, right? And this is super important because why would anybody move from a TSMC supply chain in Taiwan, if it was cost neutral to an Intel supply chain in the U.S.? Never going to happen. The timeline to that move could be measured in infinity. There needs to be strong economic inducements to reshore supply chains … And in that regard, I think tariffs are an important tool... supporting capital investment in the U.S, giving that extra tax incentives... doing what it takes to create true economic advantage to bring those supply chains back.

WSJLI: Would you have done anything differently at Intel?

Gelsinger: You know, you can always look back with perfect clarity in the rearview mirror. The windshield of being CEO of a transformative turnaround process, it's a little bit murkier right? So, clearly there are things I would have done differently in the process, but fundamentally the strategy is right. The strategy continues to be executed. Seeing them hit key milestones on that execution brings me great pride.

WSJLI: Is the transition from CEO to VC investor hard? 

Gelsinger: Oh it is, it is. I like to be in charge, right? I’m not in charge anymore. And so, how do I make tens of companies great companies, seminal companies with great leaders? That’s a transition, but one I am quite excited about.

WSJLI: And what leadership lessons are you sharing based on your experience?

Gelsinger: Driving fundamental change in an organization is just, like, butt ugly hard. You know, your organization was perfectly designed to do exactly what it's doing today. Bottom-up organizations have so many self-protection mechanisms... The budget at this department level weeds that nonsense out, preventing innovation. So what really needs to be enabled from the top... I would say when I talk to CEOs, what are the three or four business processes that are most important to you and your business future? And then how are you enabling radical innovation on those business processes that you are personally guaranteeing don't get killed?

Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, is on the ground all week from Davos, interviewing corporate leaders on topics ranging from managing AI to geopolitical risk and how C-suite leaders are navigating market conditions.

🎥 Watch video highlights of their conversations below:

🎥 Axis Capital CEO: Inside the Convergence of Cyber, Climate, and Geopolitical Risk Axis Capital's Vincent Tizzio talks about rising cyber threats, ransomware losses, and why climate, geopolitics, and corporate scrutiny are converging to reshape the global risk landscape.

🎥 Ray Dalio on a Breaking Global Order, a Riskier Dollar—and the Turn Toward Gold. The Bridgewater Associates founder talks about the implications of the breakdown of the postwar global order, rising geopolitical risk, and why history tells us that debt, capital flows, and politics are converging at a dangerous moment. 

🎥 Baker Hughes CEO Lorenzo Simonelli Outlines the Energy Reality of 2026. Simonelli discusses the geopolitical conflicts reshaping the global energy market, new opportunities in Venezuela, and reducing carbon emissions.

CEOs gathered at Davos are abuzz with the wondrous applications of artificial intelligence. But back home, the tune is quite different among staffers according to a new survey from the AI consulting firm Section of 5,000 white-collar workers, the WSJ's Lindsay Ellis reports.

• Two-thirds of nonmanagement staffers said they saved less than two hours a week or no time at all with AI.
• More than 40% of executives, in contrast, said the technology saved them more than eight hours of work a week.
• Nearly 40% said they’d be fine never using AI again.

But even among the optimistic executive class there are doubts. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of chief executives presented at Davos this week,12% said AI had delivered both cost and revenue benefits. More than half of the nearly 4,500 CEOs polled worldwide said they have seen no significant financial benefit so far.

Startups focused on inference–the process of AI models generating output in response to prompts– are seeing a wave of interest as the focus shifts from training big AI models to actually running them. Baseten is the latest, which just raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.

The round was led by venture-capital firm IVP and CapitalG, an independent growth fund, with participation from Nvidia, which is investing $150 million.

This deal comes on the heels of Nvidia paying $20 billion in December to license inference tech from startup chip designer Groq.

Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz just raised $6.75 billion for its fifth growth fund, part of a total fundraising haul reaching more than $15 billion earlier this month.

WSJ Pro spoke with David George, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who leads the firm’s growth investing, to talk about why he’s not slowing down and doesn’t believe in the idea that there’s an AI bubble.

He told WSJ Pro: 

On the supply side, much of the capex that has gone into the ground is being borne out by the largest companies in the world with healthy balance sheets.

And then the demand signals we see. On the consumer side, there has never been a technology that gets deployed to this many people who actively use it that fast. The same is happening on the enterprise side. The market pull, the demand, are the things that give me the most amount of confidence that we are not in a bubble and that we have real traction in AI.

Read the full interview here for more on why George believes OpenAI could eventually see its valuation increase well above the currently discussed $830 billion.

OpenAI on Tuesday said it is rolling out age prediction on ChatGPT globally, to determine whether an account is likely owned by a minor, as the artificial intelligence startup prepares to allow adult content on the popular chatbot, Reuters reports.

Kuaishou Technology’s AI video-generation tool has reached over 12 million monthly active users, according to people familiar with the matter, as more Chinese tech companies bet on artificial-intelligence to give them an edge.

Netflix on Tuesday reported increased revenue and profit in its fourth quarter compared with a year prior, as popular series such as the final season of “Stranger Things” boosted viewership of the company’s originals, WSJ reports.

More colleges are using AI as part of the admissions process, leveraging the technology to review essays and transcripts, Bloomberg reports.

Davos is gearing up for the arrival of President Trump, with his designs on Greenland having already raised hackles at the Swiss gathering of political and business leaders. (WSJ)

The escalating tensions over Greenland are supercharging a dynamic that was already under way: a shift in the world economic order that had put the U.S. at the center of the global economy. (WSJ)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to undermine NATO for nearly two decades. Now, as President Trump pushes to control Greenland, Moscow is cheering from the sidelines. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.