SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP361: An Overview of the AI Infra Summit with Ed Nelson

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

Daniel is joined by Ed Nelson, Strategy Director and Co-Founder of AI Infra Summit. He co-leads the production team and specializes in product strategy and management, keynote speaker acquisition and VIP network development. Ed started the summit in 2018 and has spent nearly ten years as part of the team building AI Infra Summit… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of SemaiWiki, the Open Forum for Semiconductor Professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Ed Nelson, strategy director and co-founder of the AI Infra Summit. He co-leads the production team and specializes in product strategy and management, keynote speaker acquisition, and VIP network development. Ed started the summit in 2018 and has spent nearly 10 years as part of the team building AI Infra Summit from a 300 attendee semiconductor summit into a full-stack AI Infraconference attracting over 8,000 attendees. He has confirmed keynote speakers including Jeff Dean, Andrew Ing, John Hennessy, and of course, my favorite, Lip Butan. It's a pleasure to meet you. Welcome to the podcast, Ed.

Hi, Daniel. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan, and I know you've come to the show a couple of times in the past before, so it's great to be here. Yeah, I'm very excited about the show. It has progressed so fast, but that's AI, of course. Let's start with the backstory of the summit and talk about its goals. Yeah, sure. So we started this thing back in 2018 as the AI Hardware Summit, the time it was 300 technical folks at the Computer History Museum. I think what really put us on the map is that year we launched Havana Labs out of stealth.

And obviously they were acquired a year later by Intel and became their Goudi processor unit. And going back all those years, we've enjoyed the support of companies that some of whom are now big public. companies like Cerebra Systems. Andrew Feldman was one of the first CEOs to say yes to me back in 2018 and we massively appreciate his partnership over the years. We've had Sam Manova and GROC and some of the big players like Qualcomm Synopsis, Intel and Sam Tech even have been supporting us since our very early days. And then, you know, the next thing I think that probably put us on the map was the following year when we doubled the size of the event. John Hennessy, who obviously needs no introduction to your audience,

keynoted that show, and that was the first year that Lit Bhutan started to get involved. And then, you know, since then we've merged, we had an edge AI summit as well, and we merged that with our AI hardware summit and ran that as a sort of co-located proposition for a couple of years. And then we finally rebranded that joint proposition

for AI Infra Summit last year when we moved to the Santa Clara Convention Center. And last year, we were a 4,000 attendee show, and this year we've already surpassed that number. and we're well on track for 8,000 this year and up to about 250 sponsors from 150 last year. So the growth has been incredible. Yeah, well, you pick the right place. The Santa Clara Convention Center is my favorite venue, of course.

And it's just amazing at the growth you guys have experienced. And so I'm looking forward to it. Let me ask you, what are the main things that set AI Infrasummit apart from other tech conferences? You know, I attend more than a dozen a year. And I got to tell you, you know, some of them look a little bit the same, but you guys seem to have a pretty good differentiation. Well, I appreciate that, Daniel, very much. And, you know, perhaps I should ask you that question. But, yeah, you know, every event producer that you asked this question to would say that they have a really unique value proposition.

I think ours is, you know, the easiest way to describe it these days is if you look at Jensen's five layer cake with energy chips, infrastructure, models and applications on the top, We're a full-stack AI event, but we're heavily focused on the bottom four layers of that cake with the sprinkling of the fifth top layer of applications. Most AI events, I would say, usually weighted the other way around with more of a focus on applications and software and what can AI do in XYZ industry. Whereas we're really focused on how do you scale. You know, if you're already in the sort of world of inference, if you're already, you know, how do you make your AI faster, more efficient, more affordable and more sustainable, ultimately? And most of the key bottlenecks to scale, we believe, preside in the slice of the cake that we're focused on. And, you know, we attract an enterprise audience, which I think is, you know, 35% of our audience is enterprise, which I think is very different to semiconductor conferences in general.

In terms of content, we cover everything from compute, interconnect, memory and storage through the data center power and cooling infrastructure that everything's wrapped in. We also look at how to most effectively deploy models and get the most out of infra. through the data and models track that we run. And then finally this year, as I've already said, you know, we used to have an edge AI track and that was very, very broad. And we focused it into a physical AI track this year looking at this exciting new wave of world models, robotics, and autonomous systems. Right. Yeah, the edges is probably the most exciting a place,

at least for semi-wiki because that's what everybody's designing to right now. Ed, who are the types of people that would benefit from attending? and who is it not really for? Yeah, great question. So our core audience are primarily hardware infrastructure folks, chip, interconnect memory, storage, and systems people. We're predominantly a kind of pure Silicon Valley technical conference in a way, you know, we focus more on architecturally minded builders,

you know, more technical people than business people. But there's definitely something for everyone, you know, the press love to attend, investors love to attend, and people that maybe aren't so deep in the weeds because we attract a real heavyweights to the main stage. It's really a temperature check for the whole industry every year.

Hypersalers are certainly the kind of main hub category for us. We get teams of several hundred attendees from each of the Big Five, Google, Microsoft Meta, AWS and now Oracle. And as I've mentioned enterprise leaders who are looking at what's going to be the next big unlock for them or those looking to get the most out of the infrastructure

they already have. They're also attending. They're looking to optimize things end to end, and we have this sort of full stack of solutions there. And also the AI start-ups and scale-ups that are deploying their hard-raised capital on AI infra and need that infra to be performance and efficient and affordable as they scale up their products rapidly. So I'd say the event isn't really for people who are trying to figure out the impact of AI on a particular industrial sector. You know, we're not really an event for people who are in the exploratory phase of events. AI or kicking the can. Our show is very much limited to those who are about to ramp up deployment

or already in the midst of it and they're coming up against bottlenecks of some kind. And then, of course, we are a sort of harbor marketplace for companies that provide the solutions to those bottlenecks. Yeah, you know, I think AI is probably one of the fastest moving trends or technologies to hit the semiconductor industry in my 40 years. You know, at first we saw it with generative AI, started hitting the website. Agentic AI is now huge. It's our number one. term and search term and edge AI also is a big thing so you mentioned what I think your differentiation between the shows is you guys have been able to pivot quite fast to adapt and to host this very important technology and it's fast moving and you guys are fast moving as well so you know well

that thank you daniel and you know the funny thing is is we always say that um we're always in year one this show because as you've pointed out we started as a silicon conference conference and things have just not stayed still. We couldn't focus on just compute because the systems level bottlenecks were just as important. And then as this thing has progressed, the sort of interplay between systems and models and all that sort of things become very important. So we've never been able to stand still. So every year for us feels like we're a near one.

And that's something we say a lot in the team. Yeah, that's a good business mission statement. So, all right, let me ask, what are some of the main features of this year's show? What are you most excited about, Ed? Well, I'm a production guy, so I'm always excited about the keynotes, Ian Butt, Peter DeSantis, Santos, Janadan, and actually, we share a favorite in Lipput, Bhutan. I probably shouldn't say that. Everybody, you know, I can't have favorites.

But, you know, this is a personal plug, but I was very excited this year to be asked by Intel CEO, O'Connstein to interview Litbu on the stage this year. So it's going to be my first moderation gig. While I've spent plenty of time on the stage, introducing speakers and whatever, I've never done a full scale interview. So yeah, I'm preparing pretty hard for that and really looking forward to having a chat with him. We've met a ton of times over the years. He's supported what we've done pretty much every year since we started. So he's a huge part of our growth and a huge member of our community and it's going to be a real honor to interview him on site. Yeah, so the next thing I'd say is probably the scale of the show. You know, it's always

exciting to see thousands of people streaming through the door and feel the buzz. You know, I think events are really important to people in terms of making them feel like they're making the right choices in their life, you know, like if an event is teeming and growing fast, people think, great, I'm in the right place, at the right moment in time, you know? And conversely, if you go to an event and it's a complete graveyard, it can just feel. like a really grim bellwether for the industry as a whole, it can just feel like your, you know, it can sort of have an effect on your feelings about your own choices. So we sort of feel like it's important to reflect an industry as best we can. And when an event is in a high

growth state like ours, it's super exciting just to be there and feel the buzz. The other thing we're building out is the Expo floor. We have some robotics demonstrations from Tesla and a few other different companies know physical AI is all the rage these days. We've got the full Santa Clara convention space with two exhibition hall stages, covering everything on the main program and also cool forward-looking topics like orbital data centers and quantum computing. So there's really good value for the expert only pass this year as well. Well hopefully you can get alon musk next year. He's another one of my favorite keynotes. You never know what that guy's going to say.

Yeah. Well watch this space. I'll do my best. Okay. So what are the main sticking points in the industry now that you hope the summit will help to, you know, move along, you know, or even bring resolution to. Yeah, so this is something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. And, you know, I think it's been a crazy year for the AI sector and, you know, from a sort of Wall Street perspective. And I think in the short term, we'd love to help steady some of the nerves of investors and industry observers and hopefully flip the narrative to one that's a little less boom or bust, you know, the crazy market, market volatility we've seen this year has been exhausting for everyone. I think we'd all agree. And I think there's a more measured conversation to be

had here. Obviously, there are real concerns about the profitability of some of the AI labs, which make up a significant portion of these hyperscalor backlogs, and then, of course, hypscale a capex growth and the sustainability of the data center build out generally. But I think we want to take stock and give the main infrastructure players an opportunity to give some clarity and insight through the end of the year and into 2027. And then I think honestly, longer term, we want to facilitate the partnerships that lead to some of the sort of true loftier ambitions of AI. So like example of this, Demis Hasebis has talked about his personal hope that AI will help to solve nuclear fusion, which would just be awesome. And then of course there's drug development, disease prevention and other use cases.

I think most people, you know, whether they're in the tech industry or otherwise, would feel pretty unequivocally justify the current. AI build out, you know, like some of these longer term lofty AI use cases, we'd love to be able to support some of those through what we do. Right. So this is year 10 of AI InfraSummit, but we'll say it's year one. What are your plans for next year's event and beyond that? Yeah, so next year is going to be our 10th anniversary. So this year's year nine and it's crazy to see where we've come from. First off, we're planning to scale to 12,000 attendees and 300 plus sponsors. And I think most excitingly, we're moving to the San Jose Convention Center.

So we've gone from the Computer History Museum or half of the Computer History Museum to the largest convention center in the Bay Area, which for us is a hugely proud moment. So we're very excited about that to be in the, you know, the storied halls of the of the SJCC where GTC takes place. Yeah, so we're super excited about that. We've got some pretty fun plans for next year. We're including a, we're going to do a big old party at the convention center in a session that internally we're calling the mega keynote sessions. I can't tell you too much about that right now, but more on that to come as we approach the event. But you can expect some seriously eye-popping speakers that go above even the people that we've managed to secure to

date. And of course, we'll be paying homage to the people that got us here. So some old familiar faces will be featured. And basically, it's just a big celebration of the internet. industry's last 10 years in our journey with them. And then I hope a sort of clear-eyed, honest look at what the next 10 years require in terms of building out the infrastructure we need to, you know, for example, cure cancer or solve nuclear fusion, but in a way that is responsible and sustainable. Great. Yeah.

So for more information, you guys have a great website. I would highly recommend spending the same time there. AI-infraish summit.com. and 15th at the convention center. I'm looking forward to meeting you in. Yes, likewise. Please come and say hi. And thank you so much for having me on today.

And thanks for a compliment about the events website. Those things are very hard to crack. So glad that we've managed it. Anyway, thank you so much for your time and thanks for having me on. All right. Good day. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.