The Exchanges

Q So do you buy the headlines that new data centers should be 50 or a hundred billion dollars?

A Well, I think you're going to have some data centers like that, because I think there's still going to be large-scale deployments, large, large-scale access that people want, and I think you're going to find that the world's going to be heterogeneous, that Um, there's going to be those large data centers that near people go and secure a lot of capacity for some of the things that they want to do. And I think you're going to see this new wave of companies that are doing distributed data centers, right? So these data centers are mid-sized, right? They're mid-sized, and it's going to be even more important as you go into this agentic world, because, you know, in the world of agents, you're not dealing with a single model and a single prompt, right? If I go to chat GPT, you know, we're here in France, and what should I do if I have an extra day in France?

AI assessment note: “I think you're going to have some data centers like that”

Q It's automatic. Is there, like, software in there? Like, how does that work?

A Well, there's, I mean, there's software that's, uh, on top, and so if you look at, kind of, what these, uh, uh, these API services are, and this is one of the, Beauties of what, what the open AIs and Anthropics really set up is they always set up these open standard interfaces, and so there's these API calls that you will run, and these are standard API calls, and some of them we actually match that as well, and so that when you prompt, actually it will look for a particular API to a particular model running on a particular IP address, right, and so once you actually have that, then it's a standard interface, so when you're deploying your racks at Uh, a NeoCloud or Hyperscale Cloud. You just have the same API interfaces, and then you can leverage, kind of, what's out in the open community for routing, right? And so, you were already doing that before, so if I go and, and, and I'm a, uh, customers, uh, a customer of GPUs, for example, right? The GPUs have A one-hundreds, H one-hundreds, B 200, B 200, even the different versions of it, those are being routed too, right? Because, you know, I, if I pay for the newest chip, I don't want to be, Routed to an old chip, right? And so, so same thing with, now you can just stand up other chips. You can stand up EMD chips, and Samanova chips, and other chips next to it, and they're all just already part of that ecosystem for routing, right…

AI assessment note: “there's software that's, uh, on top, and so if you look at”

Q How important do you think it is to have cloud as a product?

A It's really important. I think, you know, being able to give people very low entry cost, you know, developers being able to access for free, being able to kind of get in is really, really important. Some of them, we do that. We do that through our partners, right? So some of them, you know, for the most part, um, many of the chip companies have chosen to go build their own cloud. They compete with the AWSs of the world. We have chosen not to do that. Uh, what we decided that, you know, we want to do is focus our Our energy on creating technology that we can ship. Alright, so we ship racks. But what we've done is we've created a broad range of partners that are building the NeoCloud services, right? And so, um, um, last month we announced, um, this great partnership with Vista Equity and Cambium, uh, on this new NeoCloud, uh, Vector Core Compute, you know, VC-II. And what they're doing there is, you know, so they, they're deploying these, uh, um, uh, ultra low latency data centers because for them, you know, for them using some of the Technology opens up these markets that, you know, was, was not possible before, and so we now are able to then offer cloud services through that partnership, and actually bringing some of the biggest, ah, ah, ah, model providers into that ecosystem, because they are able to actually support all the data center, the energy, and the, you know, the fa…

AI assessment note: “It's really important. I think, you know, being able to give people very low”

Q All the energy right now is going into semiconductors. I'm sure this was a very hyped up round in some way or another. Maybe it's been faster than others. What was the process like for you?

A I've been in this industry for 32 years, building high-performance chips for a long time. I've never seen the interest in semiconductors higher, right, and I think it's a realization, ah, that, ah, um, chips are the center of this transformation. If you look at what, what, what AI is doing in the world, and The build-offs of the data centers, uh, you can't do it without, uh, chips that run and run efficiently, and so with Salmanova, we're coming in and providing technology that is able to take it to scale, take it to, um, A level of inference, uh, scaling that, uh, that's just really not that practical to achieve just with, uh, uh, traditional GPUs. And so I think the world sees that and the excitement is coming in from some of the top investors in the world.

AI assessment note: “I think the world sees that and the excitement is coming in”

Q So where we are at today is inference. Inference has really taken the stage and it's been the next evolution of computing and where everything's going with AI. So for people that don't know SambaNova, can you walk through the products and how you've evolved them for inference?

A Yeah, I mean, this, look, you know, with, with AI, you, you, you've got a sophisticated audience, so, so they know. With AI, there was, uh, always the training and the inference, uh, there's no point of training a model if you aren't going to inference it, if you're not going to use it, right, and so, uh, the, the example I use with people is, you know, you, you don't go and invent a search algorithm if you're never going to do search, right, and so saying we're not going to train a model if you aren't going to use it, and now we're in the phase of Using these models, um, we've always used them, we've always inferenced them, but it was still research to train models better and better. And so we, when we started the company in 2017, uh, we're very focused on how do we actually lower the cost of training, right? And, uh, uh, back at the time, we're training models for, uh, image recognition. Can we tell the difference between dogs and cats? And, you know, can we recognize voices? Can we make voices? You know, we're doing all that research, but really in the end, Inference wasn't really a problem yet, because the number of people using it were very small. It was people trying to test the model that they trained. Now what you're seeing at scale with Anthropic, and with OpenAI, and with Gemini, and you're at scale, you've got millions and millions of people using it every day, and s…

AI assessment note: “when we started the company in 2017, uh, we're very focused on how do we”

Q on performance. One of our sponsors is Brex, and they're all about spending more and moving faster. But on performance, I like to take it a more personal way. So for you, as you've scaled up the company throughout your career, I believe performance kind of comes down to who you surround yourself with, who you're mentored by, who you're surrounded by, like inspired. Who are those people for you?

A What I've learned in 32 years in the chip business is, um, you gotta be resilient, you gotta be, stay in it. It's never a straight line, right? Um, business as scale is gonna come with the highest highs and sometimes the lowest lows, and you gotta fight through all of it. It's never a straight line, and, um, and Jensen talks about this with NVIDIA and all the different things that that company went through, and, you know, you see it with some of the largest companies, Uh, but being very systematic about what is it you're about? What are you trying to do? You can't control what the world, uh, wants at any given point in time. You can't control what the economy does. You can't control what the politics do, right? What you can control is your conviction around what you're building and being resilient and staying with it, right? Because great businesses don't just show up overnight. You have to keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. And, and, uh, and this is what I'm proud of that, you know, we're surrounded Um, ourselves with, uh, great people, uh, that are incredibly hardworking, but more than that, incredibly resilient, right? And they just tackle the, the next challenge, the next surprise, the next, uh, thing that's got to be done with a level of consistency, and, and, and, and you keep going at it, and then you wake up one day, and you build something great.

AI assessment note: “we're surrounded Um, ourselves with, uh, great people, uh, that are incredibly hardworking”