TDK Ventures' Nicolas Sauvage bets on AI infrastructure
Original: Nicolas Sauvage is betting on the boring parts of AI
Why This Matters
Early infrastructure investments position TDK for AI boom growth
TDK Ventures founder Nicolas Sauvage manages $500M across four funds, backing AI chip startup Groq valued at $6.9B. His 2020 investment preceded the generative AI boom, focusing on inference processing infrastructure.
Nicolas Sauvage founded TDK Ventures in 2019 as the corporate venture arm of Japanese electronics giant TDK, now managing $500 million across four funds. His most notable bet is Groq, an AI chip startup valued at $6.9 billion, which he backed in 2020 before the generative AI boom. Groq focuses on inference processing, founded by Jonathan Ross who helped build Google's Tensor Processing Units. Sauvage saw opportunity in inference demand compounding with new AI applications. Despite being French and not speaking Japanese, he convinced TDK headquarters to launch the fund after attending Stanford lectures on corporate VC. The portfolio includes solid-state grid transformers, sodium-ion batteries for data centers, and alternative battery chemistries avoiding lithium and cobalt dependencies.