a16z and General Catalyst are becoming compute landlords for their startups

What's going on? Top venture firms are no longer just helping portfolio companies find GPUs; they are lining up the compute themselves. Andreessen Horowitz, which built a cluster of about 20,000 GPUs two years ago (first called Oxygen, later several private clusters), is in talks to expand that capacity through Switch and Volta, two infrastructure companies it has backed, according to people familiar who spoke to The Information. Capacity the portfolio doesn't use could be resold. An a16z spokesperson said the firm helps founders find compute, negotiate contracts and get special pricing.

General Catalyst is doing the same. General Catalyst hired former Nvidia cloud executive Alexis Black Björlin as chief strategy officer in May and is securing a data centre to serve portfolio companies from early stage to growth, two people told The Information. CEO Hemant Taneja had earlier surveyed founders about their compute needs.

Why it matters: GPU scarcity is back after hyperscalers diverted chips to their own teams and their largest customers, and access to compute is becoming part of what a VC sells to founders, alongside capital and network. a16z and GC are not alone: Coatue has its Next Frontier joint ventures with Fluidstack, Crucible Capital has a 576-chip Nvidia B300 cluster (part of it sold to a frontier lab), Sriram Krishnan's Kearny Jackson has pooled AMD MI350s, and San Francisco Compute founder Evan Conrad is building VC-controlled clusters.

What's not known: The size of the expansions, how they would be financed and whether the firms expect to profit from them are unclear. The a16z and GC plans rest on unnamed sources; only the a16z spokesperson's general description is on the record.

Source: The Information (Julia Hornstein, Dakin Campbell and Phoebe Liu, 12 Oct 2026)