Andreessen Horowitz said on August 28, 2026 that it has raised $1.1 billion for a new Machine Age Fund. Partners Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, Raghu Raghuram, David Ulevitch, and David George wrote that the vehicle will back the physical stack AI now runs on: chips, memory, networking, storage, data centers, robotics, and home AI appliances.

The note frames the raise as a response to demand that the existing hardware supply chain is not built to meet. The partners list the jumps they want founders to attack. Compute density per rack, they write, rose 28 times from an H100 rack to a Rubin rack. In-rack networking is hitting the limits of copper. Rack power has moved from roughly 5 to 10 kilowatts toward 100 to 250 kilowatts and, they say, will reach a megawatt within three years. Campus size is moving from tens of megawatts to hundreds, and in some cases gigawatts, with power coming from the grid plus behind-the-meter plants.

A formal hardware motion

a16z says hardware startups have grown from a sliver of deal flow to more than 20 percent in the past couple of years. Recent bets named in the post include Unconventional AI, Nexthop, Volta, Atoms, Heron Power, and Mind Robotics. Older checks cited as proof the firm was already in the category include a 2016 Series A lead in Skydio, SpaceX, a 2019 investment in Anduril, and an early position in Waymo’s 2020 raise.

The partners argue that each compute era forced a rebuild, from mainframes to client-server to cloud and mobile, but that this cycle is broader and faster. They want cheaper, higher-bandwidth memory, denser interconnects, more efficient edge devices, and the cooling, materials, electrical gear, and real estate underneath. Hardware suppliers, they write, are used to 20 to 30 percent annual growth, not the triple-digit rates needed to catch demand. The firm’s go-to-market, talent, and marketing teams are now being pointed at hardware founders as an official motion, alongside the American Dynamism practice.

Decoded Take

This fund is a16z saying software returns will stall if nobody finances the plants, racks, and parts those models sit on. A $1.1 billion pool is small next to the firm’s earlier $15 billion raise, which is the point: it is a specialist checkbook for companies that look like factories, not apps. The risk is that “machine age” becomes a label for every power, cooling, and robotics pitch in the inbox. The useful signal is the first named Machine Age investments after this post, and whether they are silicon, interconnect, or power rather than another robotics demo. If those checks cluster around the bottlenecks the partners listed (memory, copper, megawatt racks), the fund is doing what it said. If they do not, it is a marketing wrapper on the same American Dynamism book.