# Faraj Aalaei on Why AI Will Let Anyone Design a Chip — and What Happens When the Semiconductor Industry Finally Catches Up

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/chip-stock-investor-podcast-6441813/faraj-aalaei-on-why-ai-will-let-anyone-design-a-chip-and-what-happens-when-the-semiconductor-industry-finally-catches-up
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/chip-stock-investor-podcast-6441813/faraj-aalaei-on-why-ai-will-let-anyone-design-a-chip-and-what-happens-when-the-semiconductor-industry-finally-catches-up.md
Podcast: [Chip Stock Investor Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/chip-stock-investor-podcast-6441813)
Published: 2026-05-14T15:00:01+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/chipstockinvestor/episodes/Faraj-Aalaei-on-Why-AI-Will-Let-Anyone-Design-a-Chip--and-What-Happens-When-the-Semiconductor-Industry-Finally-Catches-Up-e3jbmlh
Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/e2cacf78/podcast/play/119969905/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-4-14%2F424126394-44100-2-fc61bf2ba62a9.mp3
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Duration seconds: 2795

## Resource

In 2000, venture capitalists funded 200 semiconductor companies. By 2015, that number had fallen to single digits. The cost of designing a chip went from $33 million in the late 1990s to over $200 million today, and it takes four or more years to complete. There are not enough engineers. The timelines are too long. The investment risk is too high. Faraj Aalaei has spent three decades watching this problem build. He co-founded Centillium Communications and took it public on Nasdaq in 1997. He co-founded Aquantia, took it public in 2017, and sold it to Marvell Semiconductors in 2019. He then spent several years investing in AI companies before recognizing that generative AI could do for chip design what it has done for software — compress timelines, reduce cost, and open the field to a much wider group of contributors. In 2024, he founded Cognichip with a straightforward but ambitious vision: everybody should be able to be a chip designer. Nick sits down with Faraj for a wide-ranging conversation that covers the full landscape — why the semiconductor industry has a structural problem that EDA companies like Synopsys and Cadence cannot solve alone, why generic large language models fall flat when applied to chip design, how Cognichip trains physics-informed models on proprietary synthetic data without touching any customer IP, and what actually happens to the semiconductor industry when design timelines collapse from years to months. The implications are significant. Hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and Microsoft could design more bespoke ASICs faster and cheaper. Foundries like TSMC would see shorter cycles between customer signup and first wafer revenue. Startups that today cannot raise funding because the design cost is too high would suddenly become investable. And com…

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