Why AI Compute Comes in Rectangles — Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO

In this interview, Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson explains why fixed-term GPU capacity contracts look like rectangles while real workloads grow, spike, and fall, and describes Modal's approach of pooling demand across thousands of customers to use capacity elastically. He also discusses Modal's sandboxes, which he says have grown to roughly a third of revenue, and the infrastructure work—such as checkpointing and GPU memory snapshots—that makes fast startup possible. Modal reports crossing $1 billion in annualized run rate, raising a $750 million Series D at a $16 billion valuation, and spinning up nearly three billion sandboxes.