Anjney Midha launches AMP, a $1.3B+ public benefit corporation to be the 'independent system operator' of the AI compute grid

AMP: Anjney Midha's $1.3B+ compute utility

Anjney Midha, former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has launched AMP, a public benefit corporation structured to function as what he calls the "independent system operator" of the AI compute grid. Eight weeks in, the firm has over $1.3 billion committed for its first fund, with Midha as the sole key-man GP.

The core problem AMP is solving is straightforward: compute clusters across the AI ecosystem are running badly underutilized. Midha cites Elon Musk's 500,000 GB300s in Memphis running at 11% MFU and below 60% node allocation — roughly $12 billion of wasted computing capacity. His fix is to buy compute on long-term leases, aggregate those clusters onto a shared grid, and pass capacity through to portfolio companies at cost. By year-end, he expects several billion dollars of compute online.

The venture arm, called AMP Foundry, co-designs and co-funds focused scientific labs rather than doing traditional VC spray-and-pray. The current flagship is Periodic Labs, a 30,000-square-foot Menlo Park facility using robotics and ML to discover high-temperature superconductors. The loop: AI predicts new materials, robots synthesize them, an X-ray diffraction machine tests for the predicted properties, and results feed back into training. Midha says Periodic Labs generated more material verifications in the last 90 days than the field has seen in roughly a decade. The co-founders are Liam (co-creator of ChatGPT) and Doge, who led quantum physics teams at DeepMind.

AMP also has a prior position in Anthropic, where Midha says he was among the first investors, putting $300 million into the company.

“I started AMP as a holdings business... the infrastructure business secures compute and passes on at cost to our portfolio companies. We have more than $1,300,000,000 in commits for our first fund. I've been at it eight weeks... we put $300,000,000 into Anthropic... AMP is a self regulated utility that provides venture capital and infrastructure to the world's leading scientific teams.”

The PBC structure

The public benefit corporation structure is partly philosophical, partly legal self-defense. Midha frames AMP as a self-regulated utility: venture capital and compute infrastructure both generate positive externalities that markets tend to underprovide, and rather than wait for government intervention, AMP is trying to price and govern itself accordingly. The more practical reason is liability — giving away billions of dollars of compute at cost is hard to defend to conventional shareholders, and the PBC charter removes that exposure.

He draws an explicit analogy to 1885 industrial England: scarce coal (compute) being hoarded by individual factories running private generators at half capacity, when a shared grid would be far more efficient. The firms that corrected that market failure eventually got regulated as utilities. Midha's bet is that AMP becomes that utility voluntarily, before regulators impose it.

Team and structure

The firm is five people. Engineering co-founder Sebastian Bobo built Google's Borg/GQM scheduler, which kept Google's internal capacity pool above 95% utilization — dropping to 94% was treated as a major global outage. Operations partner Andrew Erskine was previously at ORIC (outside counsel for Anthropic) and served as GC at Ubiquiti Networks, the startup Midha sold to Discord in 2020. Chief of staff Rosie ran comms for Midha at Andreessen Horowitz.

AMP is in the process of registering as an RIA, a requirement given its public market ambitions alongside the private portfolio.

The eBay / GameStop thesis (sidebar)

Midha opens the conversation with an unprompted read on Ryan Cohen's GameStop-eBay bid that's worth noting for investors tracking that deal. His argument: the question isn't whether GameStop can finance the acquisition — it's whether the underlying business works. EBay spent $2.4 billion on marketing in fiscal 2025 and acquired 1 million net new users, a cost of roughly $2,400 per new user on a platform every American already knows. Midha reads that as $2 billion of removable fat that Wall Street has been treating as fixed cost — cut it, service the debt, done.

The bull case goes further. Amazon's used and collectibles business has been flat for six years across multiple failed product attempts. Collectibles, Midha argues, are structurally defensible against Amazon because you can't run a 1962 Mickey Mantle card through the same warehouse as a phone charger. GameStop's ~1,600 physical stores become the verification layer for agentic commerce — an AI agent shopping for rare assets can't confirm authenticity without a physical checkpoint. That insight comes from his time running Discord's commerce business during the 2021 NFT summer, when more than $10 billion in GMV flowed through Discord buy-sell channels. NFTs worked because blockchain provided on-chain verification; rare physical goods didn't, and Discord killed the product because building retail verification infrastructure was out of scope.