Sand Hill Road
Sand Hill Road
NBC Bay Area
Gradient Ventures Darian Shirazi on AI, Moats and China
31 minutes Posted Aug 18, 2026 at 6:00 pm.
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Gradient Ventures' Darian Shirazi says the real winners of the AI era won't be the companies with the best models - it'll be whoever owns the data centers, the chips, and the compute underneath them. Fresh off spinning out of Google, Shirazi explains why Gradient has steered away from funding foundation models, and why China's lead in open source could reshape the whole stack.