In The Arena by TechArena - Momenthesis’ Matty Bakkeren: ‘We Need to Keep Open Open’

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

At OCP’s 2025 global summit, Momenthesis founder Matty Bakkeren joins Allyson Klein to explore why open standards and interoperability are vital to sustaining AI innovation at datacenter scale.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name's Allison Klein. We're coming to you from OCP Summit in San Jose, California. And I'm back with Maddie Bacharin, sounder and principal of moment thesis. Maddie. elephant it's so fantastic to have you back I know and it's fun we got a lot of technology a lot of people lots to talk about so the one thing I didn't mention in your title is that you're also a voice of innovation on the tech arena platform this is true this is a title you bestowed upon me which I'm very grateful for yeah that's a lot of fun

so tell me about moment thesis and the progress that you're making with your company wow okay so a lot is happening so for those who don't know I own and run a consulting company that focuses on disruptive data center technology and we help companies get and go to market and basically figure out their narrative and story in market. There's a lot happening in the data center space. You might have picked up on a few things here. A lot of transformation happening in the data center. And it is so diverse and the speed of it is, it's so fast right now. So, yeah, a lot of companies are not going to say struggling, but it's a challenge to figure out how to get your product in the limelight. This is where we can help. For me,

business has been picking up, which is really great. And the benefit of being an entrepreneur is like, you're a kid in a candy store. You can pick the technologies and the things you really like. And there's a lot to pick from right now. So good times. Now, I know you're deep into OCP. And this summit, oh my God. I thought last year's summit was incredible, but this one is off the hook. Over 11,000 people. Yeah. This open letter coming out saying that we must move faster and we must do it with open standards. How do you have? take where OCP is today in terms of its relative influence on data centers? So its influence is growing.

And first of all, heads off to the OCP community and the OCP Foundation, pulling all of that innovation into one place. And big names are fully on board with this, right? I think a game changer was when NVIDIA adopted. But before that you had Microsoft, you had Google. Everybody was already sort of on this train. But as the speed of innovation is increasing, so is the adoption of OCP. It's almost like there's a correlation.

And you just said it, open standards, right? Open is the innovation engine, and that's what the OCP foundation embodies. I think that would be my short answer. My longer answer would be just look at the variation and the merit of technologies that are coming at us. And it's not just the pace. I really liked what the gentleman in the Google keynote said. He said, not only is the innovation advancing in terms of speed, Every generation of innovation comes with its own set of diverse challenges.

So, you know, that's like a compounding factor. So this industry is going through a tremendous change. And you can see it on the shop floor. I mean, every time I go to a show now, I think my metric is the size of the CDUs. Okay. It's like now it's a megawatt. That's 1.2 megawatts. Now it's two megawatts.

And, you know, you need like a plumbing degree to fix these things now. So it's just massive. And it's a bellwether for where the industry is going. And here's my question to you, is this going to last? I think that we're just right at the beginning of the adoption curve. And so I do think it's going to last. And I think that when you think about it, it was in November of 22 that Chatchip E.T was announced. Yeah.

That is less than three years ago. Yeah. And I think that when you think about the broad application of generative AI, it's just starting an enterprise. So when you think about that, the amount of infrastructure that needs to fuel this of the next half-deck, kid is astounding. And I think that there's one other thing in there. I think that OCP sent a huge signal that the future of computing is heterogene volts. They announced three new members of the board, Arm, NVIDIA, AMD.

And that is interesting, by the way. Yes, I agree. Yeah. I mean, that shows that when it comes to choice, this is going down into the silicon level. It's going all the way up into the solution stack level. and design points are shifting to the rock scale. Yeah. You call it design points.

I would also say some of the design fundamentals are being shaken, changed, or basically just abandoned and new ones are being established. And these are things that we've worked within the industry as foundational for decades. And you've got to wonder, though, at some point, the rate of innovation is great,

but the rate of power consumption, the rate of cooling. I mean, look at the size of the data centers. It's a little problematic, yes. And that comes with its challenge. So there's this rumor, are we in an AI bubble? That is in the back of my mind as well. As great as all the innovation and everything is,

I do wonder sometimes, like, where are we going? And we hear a lot about the hyperscalers here, but there's also all the other players are out there. What are they doing with this innovation? How are they tracking? And that's great about Open because Open is not just for the one, it's for all. The OCP tagline is hyperskill innovation for all.

I do think the hyperscalers are the innovators. and I just just so much that I'm back here. I think that one of the topics that I think we're going to be hearing about, and it's not that we haven't heard about it before, but the need to realize efficiency. I think that there's been some glad hands around it in a lot of circles. I think that when you think about liquid cooling, it offers an opportunity to drive increased efficiency.

But more importantly, it's about utilization of the compute to actually solve problems more quickly. And I think that storage, memory, network, feeding data, moving data, prepping data is going to be more and more of a focus as we move forward because that's how you actually get into elegant deployments in the space. Yeah, yeah. So you just said we're just at the beginning of it. And I think maybe that's part of this as well, right?

At the beginning, you can't see where you're going. But when you're like five or six steps down the road, you can reflect and sort of can connect the dots. That's a Steve Jobs goal, if I'm not mistaken. But there's so much truth in that. Again, some of these deployments right now, we don't know where we're heading, but this is the great thing about innovation, right? We will out-innovate those solutions.

Liquid cooling is a solution for the cooling problem, and it is more sustainable. And I saw some of the innovations here. You see the Zudacore one, right? You just vaporize the liquid on the CPU that creates the flow. That's a different way of doing the same thing. You don't need pumps. Okay, that's interesting. Microsoft came out with the micro-etching on the chip,

So you don't cool on the chip, though you go into the chip and Vidao wants to do that as well. So again, we're going through all these steps, and I guess that's exciting because that's the stuff we get to talk about. We got to work with the industry and figure out what sticks, what hunts, what makes sense, and what are the use cases for this? I think that this year I'm talking to a lot of companies, too,

that provide foundational technology to make data center infrastructure actually take flight. And they're realizing, wow, I actually do something foundational, and I'm not getting credit for the technology innovation that I'm driving. I think there's going to be a broadening of the tent in terms of the types of technologies that we're going to talk about. And I can't wait to see the next wave of startups that come into this space to fill some of those voids.

Yeah. This is an interesting one because so AI, I think it's been debated in so many ways, right? But you have the architecture from an IT perspective, from a cooling perspective, from a power perspective, but that has its whipple effects on the facilities, on the construction, on the layout of the floor. Concrete. Concrete. And then the utilities, because if you do a large training jobs and these things start to go up and down in power,

you actually create a glitch on the grid. So now the utility companies get involved. It is so pervasive across everything we do in the data center. I haven't even touched upon quantum because that's around the corner that's coming. What are optical interconnects going to do? Because everything now is based on copper. We're going to these double-width racks. Have you seen them?

Yeah. Okay. And it's basically because we're still on copper. Once we have optical interconnects, we don't need that anymore. So we already know this is a stepping stone too. And again, that's technology for you. And as these roadmaps will evolve and we go through these cycles, I think we'll see, like you say, it's exciting to see what comes next.

But that's typical of technologists, right? We always look forward. We never look back. But if we look back, isn't it crazy? Like, we have direct liquid cooling now in servers and it's normal. five years ago, people would be saying, like, are you crazy, liquid, in my data center, in my server, next to my critical workloads?

I don't think so. And yet, here we are. Yeah, no, and I think that even three years ago, when you and I were in Lisbon, people were discussing that. Is that three years ago? I think, oh, maybe two. Yeah, okay.

But people were discussing that. It was still a debate. Now it's a fait accompli and in broad rule out. Yep. That's how quickly this industry is moving. Yeah. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention

A big announcement from you today, the OCP Academy. Why don't you tell me about that? Okay, so this is exciting, right? So as I said, Open is an innovation engine, and I believe as a person, but also as a company, right, it's about giving back as well. So I was approached by the OCP Foundation if I wanted to help them out on creating an e-learning course

in their upcoming, I cannot talk about it, which is really cool, by the way, so first time I'm doing that, if I could help them with the OCP Academy, so it's a learning platform for people to learn about technology, And again, it being open, it means it lowers the barriers, the entry for people to get into this space. But one of the most fundamental things is the data center itself. What is a data center? How does it function?

What are some of the high-level technologies and mechanisms? So I got to summarize that and build this e-learning course, which, by the way, is a fun thing to do. It takes a lot of time, but it's a fun thing to do. And everybody here, and you can go to the OCP Academy, look for the data center basics training. And I'll walk you straight to and we'll have some fun and a lot of it. That's fantastic. I can't wait to see your first session. I will definitely check it out. Okay. Now, I want to ask you about Europe, and you're based in Europe. You understand European markets. You understand global markets. OCP Europe, biggest ever this year in Dublin.

OCP Asia. Huge success for the organization. What is the say about the data center community and where innovation is taking place? And how do you look at something like the flagship summit in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley versus some of the regional events. Yeah, so I think this is a really good question. And actually, this is one I've been pondering a little bit this week. So first of all, the skill of this event versus the other events, that's just night and day, right? And I mean, it's for good reasons. So the hyperscalals are here.

This is close to where the innovation happens. So I totally get that. But I also sense a difference in focus. So whereas in Europe particularly, there's more emphasis on what are these next wave cloud providers and these enterprises doing with OCP. Whereas here, it's like 90% high per scale. Yeah. Because that's where the market is at. And then if you'll remember in the keynotes, there was the IDCD report.

There was this number of $259 billion markets share. And a large portion of that was the US. So I think from a European perspective, we have some work to do to figure out, okay, how do we take? all that innovation and how do we right-size it for the enterprise? Because hyperscale innovation is not innovation for an enterprise or a CSP. Neo-Clouds are sort of in the middle, right? But again, it's open. You can take and pick what you need from this and then apply it to your situation. For me, personally, I would love to see the OCP community enterprise get a bit of a bigger voice in this, so it's more balanced. Because not everybody has a gig of a data center. Not everybody

has IA pots. Enterprises will want to do IA on-prem. What does that look like in an OCP setup? Not everybody has the massive budgets and the in-house resources to build some of these really cool structures that we talk about.

So how can we take those innovation? And how do we transport that back to some of the other regions? Now, that's Europe. At the same time, I think Europeans are very creative in Asia. There's a lot of development heavily, right? They're pushing the envelope of what you can do with technology.

So that's the other flip side of the coin. Mix them all together. And all of a sudden, you've got a very nice balanced palette of innovation going on. So again, I think that speaks for the OCP organization. And it's just fun to debag

into these events and, you know, sample that. That's awesome. Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot. You've been here for a day walking through the showcase, attending sessions. I know that you were up yesterday going to the keynotes,

keynotes this morning. What is the one thing that you've heard that you're like, that is the topic that we'll be talking about in 2020 since? That is a question where you're putting me on the spot. Oh, that's a really good question. I haven't figured that out yet. Like, typically, I will come to a conclusion when I'm on the plane ride back. But if you were to ask it to me now, for me, I go back to the basics. It's the standardization. It's the openness. All the innovation. It needs. It needs. needs to be rooted in a way where all these different parties come together. And the more I hear of all these different innovations, the more I also hear a cry for,

we need to come together and do this together. Actually, you mentioned this, the latter, you just, I haven't read it yet. But it sounds to me like the tone is, there's so much going on in the AI industry, we need to come together. We need to build open standards and do this in lockstep. Right now, if you ask me, I think that's the thing I would say, like we need to figure out a way where all of these innovations are more in sync and we really take from each other and we keep open. It's a weird way of saying that.

But the beauty of open is you can take from it and you can apply it and then you do your old little thing. Like we've seen with the OCP Nickards, right? Every vendor has one, but they deal it like in a roll little way, but it's based on the same innovation. I think what's now happening is we can't do that anymore because things are moving so rapidly. We need to be compatible. Think of DCMHS, right? It is a standard. It is open, but I can't mix two vendors yet. That needs to be open. That needs to be one standard. And I think that interoperability that standardization, that is becoming a very critical thing. I think that is a lovely place to wrap up our conversation.

That was fantastic. I'm going to talk to you next week and see if you still agree with that topic. I think that is the one thing that we're going to be talking about as well, too. So that was my answer as well. Amazing. Maddie, one more question for you. Where can folks engage with you learn more about Moment thesis and what you're doing and follow along with your publications?

your prognostications. Right. Okay. So there's a bit of a list. First of all, my company website is www.m momentthesis.com. It's momentum and synthesis. So momentthesis.com. It has a LinkedIn page where I share some stuff. If you're really geeky and you want to geek out with me, join me on my personal LinkedIn page. Maddie Backrun, your guys put something in the video. And then follow me on Tech Arena. We geek out a little bit every now and then and then we write an article. We just did one on N-level power, which is like the Internet of Power. If you don't know what that means, look it up. I've already figured out my next article, by the way, so I can give the sneak peek if you want. Okay, that's great. I want to talk about nickel-zinc UPSs, because I think

that's a very cool innovation. So that's going to be the next one somewhere later this year. Awesome. Thank you so much, and we'll wrap another episode of Tech Arena. Thanks for joining Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, Techorina.com. All content is copyright by Tech Arena. Thank you.