News
Nicolas Sauvage is betting on the boring parts of AI
Nicolas Sauvage believes it takes four years for the best bets to look obvious — thinking that he shared on stage last week at StrictlyVC’s San Francisco event, which TDK Ventures co-hosted.
It’s a theory he’s been working to prove since 2019, when he founded the corporate venture arm of the Japanese electronics giant, which is now managing $500 million across four funds. The AI chip startup Groq, valued at $6.9 billion during its most recent funding round last fall, is the highest-profile example of this thinking.
In 2020, well before the generative AI boom made infrastructure bets look obvious, Sauvage wrote a check into the company, which was founded by Jonathan Ross — one of the engineers who built Google’s Tensor Processing Units. Groq was focused from the start on inference: the computational heavy lifting that happens every time a model responds to a query. Ross had designed his chip by building the compiler first, stripping the architecture down until, as Sauvage describes it, “you can’t remove one part and have it still work.”
It might have looked niche to some, but knowing what he did about his parent company’s constraints, Sauvage saw asymmetry. Unlike consumer hardware, which has a natural ceiling, demand for inference keeps compounding with every new application and every new model. Sauvage couldn’t know then that demand for inference would explode this year, thanks to every AI agent that plans and acts across dozens of calls (where a single query used to suffice).
But in some ways, Ross got lucky, too. After all, a Japanese electronics conglomerate best known for magnetic tape is not, on its face, the most obvious investing partner. In fact, Sauvage describes TDK Ventures’ own existence as very unlikely. But after two back-to-back Stanford lectures — one making the case for corporate VC, one cataloguing every reason it fails — Sauvage, who is French and joined TDK in Silicon Valley through an acquisition, pitched the idea to higher-ups at TDK headquarters despite having no obvious standing to do so. (“I’m not Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese; I don’t live in Tokyo,” he told this editor.)
After refusing to take no for an answer, he finally received the green light in to build a fund whose mandate was to answer one question: What’s the next big thing for TDK, and what might kill it?
The portfolio he has since assembled is dotted with technologies that have become more widely interesting to VCs over the last year: solid-state grid transformers, sodium-ion batteries for data centers, alternative battery chemistries that sidestep the geopolitical fragility of lithium and cobalt.
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The discipline behind all of it is the same: identify the bottleneck four years out, then find the founders already working on it.
The question, of course, is what’s next. For his part, Sauvage is watching physical AI closely — not all of robotics but robots with a highly specific job to be done. Agility Robotics, for example, in his portfolio, focuses on the single, mundane task of moving things from one place to another in warehouses facing workforce shortages. Another portfolio company, Swiss portfolio ANYbotics, builds ruggedized robots for environments too hazardous for human workers — places where the job definition is essentially to go where people can’t. The through-line is clarity of purpose. The robots Sauvage is betting on don’t try to do everything; instead, they do one hard thing reliably.
Sauvage says he’s also watching the compute stack shift again. GPUs dominated training — the massive, parallel computation of teaching a model. Inference chips like Groq’s are reshaping what happens when that model speaks: faster, cheaper, at scale. Now, Sauvage argues, CPUs are due for a renaissance. They’re not the most powerful chips or the fastest. But they’re the most flexible and best suited to the branching, decision-making logic of orchestration. When an AI agent delegates a task, checks on its progress, and loops back across dozens of steps, something has to manage the whole choreography. That something, increasingly, looks like a CPU.
And then there’s China. A recent report from Eclipse — a venture firm he follows closely — documented what Sauvage describes as “vibe manufacturing” — the rapid, AI-assisted iteration of physical hardware prototyping, mirroring what vibe coding did for software. Chinese manufacturers, the report found, are compressing the design-build-test cycle for physical products in ways Western supply chains aren’t yet equipped to match.
For Sauvage, it’s a bottleneck signal — and one he’s already moving on with TDK Ventures’ various investments. One remaining unsolved problem, he says, is dexterity. Models are improving fast enough that physical AI feels inevitable; what’s still missing is the physical fluency to match. The countries and companies that figure out how to iterate on atoms as fast as others iterate on code will have a manufacturing advantage. That’s the wave for which he’s positioning TDK Ventures today.
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By Jos Events
TikTok users in parts of Northern Nigeria are reporting persistent difficulties accessing the popular social media platform, with many turning to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in an attempt to restore access.
The disruption has been reported particularly in Kaduna, Kano and Sokoto, where users say the TikTok application has become difficult or impossible to use through regular internet connections. Reports indicate that the problem began around September 11–14, 2026, although the exact timing appears to vary from one location to another.
Affected users have described several problems, including videos failing to load, feeds freezing while scrolling, difficulty refreshing content and uploads repeatedly stalling. Some users have also reported difficulties accessing TikTok through mobile browsers.
In several cases, users said the platform became accessible after activating a VPN, which changes the route through which their internet traffic reaches TikTok. However, the fact that TikTok works through a VPN does not by itself prove that the platform has been deliberately blocked by the government or telecommunications companies.
No Official Suspension Confirmed
Despite growing reports from users, there has been no official public confirmation from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), telecommunications operators, the Federal Government, TikTok, or the governments of the affected states that TikTok has been officially banned or suspended.
The cause of the disruption therefore remains unclear.
Possible explanations mentioned in reports include a technical problem, network-routing issue, traffic-management measure or deliberate network-level restriction. None of these explanations has been officially established.
What About Plateau State?
For users in Plateau State, including Jos, reports currently available do not provide sufficient evidence to confirm that the same disruption is affecting the entire state.
However, as TikTok remains an important platform for entertainment, news, content creation, advertising and business promotion in Jos and across Plateau State, any prolonged access problem could affect creators, event promoters, businesses and other users who depend on the platform to reach their audiences.
TikTok is particularly significant for small businesses and content creators who use short-form videos to promote products, services, events, music, tourism and other activities.
Users in Jos and other parts of Plateau State are therefore encouraged to share their experiences, including their network provider and whether TikTok works normally, intermittently or only when connected through a VPN.
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