TL;DR: Every AI company is fighting over text and image training data, but the only company that owns enough professional 3D design data to train physical-world AI models, and is actually willing to use it, is Autodesk. They're building foundation models on decades of CAD data, and the market hasn't connected the dots yet. Zero DD posts on this sub. Current price \~$240, forward non-GAAP P/E of 19x, PEG near 1.
The Setup: AI Hits a Wall
Two weeks ago on Lenny's Podcast, Caitlin Kalinowski laid out the problem. Kalinowski was technical lead on the MacBook Air and Mac Pro at Apple, built every Oculus Rift and Quest headset at Meta, and ran OpenAI's robotics division until she quit over the defense deal. Here's what she said:
"Right now, we're right at the very, very beginning of AI being able to do CAD. Claude can do what is essentially surfaces or point clouds. This is not real CAD."
She explained that current LLMs don't understand friction, weight, contact pressure, or surface texture. They can write code and generate images, but they cannot design a physical object that actually works in the real world. A bracket that looks right but has wall sections too thin for injection molding isn't a bracket. It's a rendering.
Then she dropped the line that matters for this thesis:
"The biggest challenge here is actually the data. This CAD data is some of the most valuable IP that anybody has. Samsung, they're not going to want to give their 3D CAD to a model vendor. This is proprietary. This is the secret sauce. So where is this data going to come from is a big question I have."
She said you're going to need a base model trained on massive amounts of CAD data, and that it will probably require entirely new model types, not LLMs, to make it work.
Who Has the Data?
Autodesk holds over 25% of the global CAD software market. Combined with their other products (Revit, Inventor, Fusion, Forma), they touch architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing. Hundreds of millions of professional designs have been created in their tools over decades. They have the largest corpus of professional 3D design data on the planet.
At Autodesk University 2025, they announced Neural CAD: a new category of foundation models trained specifically on professional design data, built as a new model architecture that reasons directly about CAD geometry, shapes, components, manufacturing constraints, and building layouts rather than wrapping an LLM around existing software.
Their chief scientist described commissioning designers to create "gold standard" training data: fully constrained, annotated models built specifically to train these models at a quality level beyond what normal customers produce. They're also using customer data (with permission controls) and synthetic data. In the future, enterprise customers will be able to fine-tune the models on their own proprietary data in a sandboxed environment where nothing leaks into the global training set.
Kalinowski described the exact product Autodesk is building without naming them. The market hasn't connected these two things.
Why Nobody Else Can Do This
Dassault Systèmes (SolidWorks, CATIA): The obvious competitor. They have the data. They also have revenue growth of 0.36% in 2025, a contracting life sciences division from the Medidata acquisition they can't divest, weak European automotive exposure, and a stock that dropped 20% in a single day in February on their worst earnings miss ever. They're cleaning house and managing a platform migration. They are not shipping AI foundation models. Their SolidWorks 2026 AI features are incremental.
Siemens (NX, Solid Edge): Acquired Altair for $10.6B to get simulation AI, yet Siemens is a massive industrial conglomerate where the CAD/PLM division is a fraction of total revenue. You can't buy "AI transforms CAD" through Siemens without also buying trains and power grids.
PTC (Creo, Onshape): Onshape is cloud-native,