The Exchanges

Q So maybe that's a good segue into how you got started working on this, because you've had this idea for a long time. As you said, you started on, um, uh, space applications earlier. Can you talk a little bit about your background and, you know, the original scientific idea and how you thought it would be applied?

A Sure. Uh, so my background is in material science and electrical engineering. I obtained a PhD in electrical engineering with a minor in material science and device physics from Cornell. Uh, and in my PhD, Uh, I focused on bringing together very dissimilar materials, uh, in such a way that one plus one equals 10, okay? Uh, and, and, you know, for example, silicon, very well known, ubiquitous material that's ushered in the current modern era that we have today, uh, but then there are other materials, plastics, other types of semiconductors that don't actually Do as well as silicon, but they have their own strengths. Um, and so for my PhD, I looked at ways of trying to bring together say the optics world with electronic silicon and merging them together such that the overall system is incredibly powerful. That philosophy I've brought to Akash when I started Akash with Ty in 2017 to try to do the same thing. Um, I often found personally Uh, actually, I think it's a very good, good metaphor for, for, for humans, how we interact together. When you bring different people that have different strengths, the combination can be incredibly powerful in ways that excel and exceed the simple summation of the parts, and that's exactly what we do at Akash, where we bring, uh, artificial diamonds, well known as the most thermally conductive material ever grown in nature, Or ever to occur in nat…

AI assessment note: “my background is in material science and electrical engineering. I obtained a PhD”

Q If I think about the complaints that people have running large data centers as, uh, blockers or issues to deal with, it is chip supply, GPU reliability, power supply, heat. Like how, how does heat relate to all of these other issues?

A Um, everything you mentioned is heat. I mean, uh, we see the same thing, by the way, in space. Uh, every problem that one addresses in space, it's almost like a whack-a-mole. Unless you go to the source of the problem, which is the heat, the heat producer, you're really just playing whack-a-mole. You knock it down here, it'll show up elsewhere. Um, everything you've just described is, is a, is a heat problem. And by the way, this is, right, there are billions of these chips. One simple Server, the ones that we ship today have eight GPUs in each single blade, uh, and then, and then scores more of other chips equally heat producing. Um, and so we at Akash are actually just scratching the surface of this problem. It's, it's a pervasive problem up and down the supply chain. You just, uh, mentioned, uh, the way that it shows up in the world, the fact that we're trying to do more with what we have. All it's doing, it's breaking the bank. It's costing a tremendous amount of money. It's leading to reliability issues. Uh, servers, oftentimes it's not uncommon for them to suddenly have an infant mortality. It shows up and it has problems right away. Uh, when it gets up to that, you know, 80, 90 degrees C temperature, it starts to curb back performance. Thermal throttling. This is something a lot of your listeners are going to be familiar with. The fact that the operating system has to ba…

AI assessment note: “everything you've just described is, is a, is a heat problem.”