It has been a busy month for the a16z general partner, who also helped lead the firm’s investments into Open Router and Cursor Hardware is back. Just ask Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Martin Casado, who helps lead the firm’s newly announced $1.1 billion Machine Age fund. Casado, a Stanford University Ph.D. in computer science, remembers attending Hot Chips, an annual Stanford semiconductor conference, in the early 2000s, when it was largely populated by industry retirees reminiscing about the good old days.

"If you went to Hot Chips last week, it’s young and energetic," Casado said. "It’s a very dynamic and evolving space. Hardware is cool again." Casado joined Andreessen in 2016 and leads the firm’s infrastructure practice, investing in computer science infrastructure like network, compute, storage and developer tools, among other things. His team led the venture firm’s investments in Open Router, which agreed to be acquired by Stripe this month, and Cursor, purchased by Space X. Andreessen is expected to net north of $8 billion from its investments in the two companies, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

We caught up with Casado to understand Andreessen’s philosophy for hardware investing and where infrastructure—both hardware and software—goes from here. Here are edited excerpts. WSJ Pro: You have pointed to artificial intelligence bottlenecks and the shifting focus of founders toward hardware as the motivation for launching the Machine Age fund. Andreessen has made hardware investments before. When did it become clear there was critical mass in this category and that it deserved its own focused fund? MC: We keep track of all the inbound leads that we have every time we have a partner meeting, which is every week. We were like, you know what? Twenty to 30% of these deals are hardware. And not only that, we’re actually spending a lot of time engaging on them, because the teams are so good. The second realization was, we work with many of these [AI] companies and in every case, there’s consternation around getting supply. So there’s a confluence of two facts: This on the ground learning about the need, as well as the observation that founders are going toward it.