Autonomy
Robotics
On-Device ML
Enterprise Use Case
Bala Chidambaram
Chief Engineer & Senior Director, Autonomy, Office of the CTO
Boeing
When it comes to AI, inference is how today’s gen AI models can solve real-world business problems. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is seeing an increasing adoption of gen AI inference. In this session, discover how GKE empowers customers to achieve high-performance, cost-effective, and scalable AI inference through cutting-edge Gen AI inference innovations.
Optimized Infrastructure
Inferencing
Nathan Beach
Director, Product Management
Google Cloud
Nathan Beach is Director of Product Management for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). He leads the product team working to make GKE a great platform on which to run AI workloads. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and, prior to Google, led his own startup. He is a builder and creator passionate about making products that superbly meet user needs. He enjoys career coaching and mentoring, and he is eager to help others transition into product management and excel in their careers.
Networking
Dave Lazovsky
Co-Founder & CEO
Celestial
Dave Lazovsky is the Co-founder and CEO of Celestial AI, the creators of the Photonic FabricTM. Celestial AI, founded in April 2020, has developed the optical interconnectivity technology platform for AI computing.
Prior to founding Celestial AI, Mr. Lazovsky was a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures. He has 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry and over two decades of experience building and leading successful start-ups. In 2004 Mr. Lazovsky founded Intermolecular, a semiconductor and clean energy R&D and Intellectual Property licensing company. He served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer, President and as a member of the board of directors from September 2004 through October 2014.
As President and CEO, Mr. Lazovsky led all aspects of the business through its lifecycle from early-stage start-up to public company. Intermolecular (IMI) went public on the NASDAQ in 2011. He currently has over 80 issued and pending U.S. patents.
Ram Velaga
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Core Switching Group
Broadcom
Ram Velaga is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Core Switching Group at Broadcom, responsible for the company’s extensive Ethernet switch portfolio serving broad markets including the service provider, data center and enterprise segments. Prior to joining Broadcom in 2012, he served in a variety of product management roles at Cisco Systems, including Vice President of Product Management for the Data Center Technology Group. Mr. Velaga earned an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University and an M.B.A. from Cornell University. Mr. Velaga holds patents in communications and virtual infrastructure.
RK Anand
Co-Founder and CPO
RECOGNI
RK Anand is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Recogni, an artificial intelligence startup based in San Jose specializing in building multimodal GenAI inference systems for data centers.
At Recogni, RK spearheads the company’s product development and Go-To-Market strategies within the data center industry.
With an unwavering commitment to customer needs and value creation, RK and the Recogni team are striving to deliver the highest performing and most cost and energy efficient multi-modal GenAI systems to the market.
RK brings over 35 years of leadership experience in data center compute systems, networking, and silicon development. His distinguished career includes engineering roles at Sun Microsystems and serving as Executive Vice President and General Manager at Juniper Networks. As one of the earliest employees at Juniper, RK played a pivotal role in the company’s growth from a startup to generating billions of dollars in revenue.
The future of AI demands a revolution in infrastructure. As frontier AI models strain the limits of traditional silicon scaling and copper connectivity, a fundamental shift is needed. AI data centers already consume as much power as the largest cities on Earth and continue to grow at an exponential rate. As the industry turns to optics for connecting the next generation of XPU superclusters, we will need more than 100x the bandwidth and double the power efficiency of existing, shoreline-bound optical technologies.
This keynote will present the vision for 3D photonics, a technology that is transforming not only how XPUs and switches are interconnected but also the design of the underlying silicon and packaging. We will reveal how Passage, the world's first 3D co-packaged optics solution, enables a new edgeless I/O design paradigm. This paradigm delivers massive scale-up bandwidth, linking tens of thousands of XPUs with unprecedented energy efficiency. We will also detail the fundamental performance and operational breakthroughs, as well as the broad ecosystem partnerships that are enabling volume production and deployment in hyperscale data centers. Join us to learn how this technology is driving a new era of AI supercomputing.
Nick Harris
Founder, CEO
Lightmatter
Nick Harris is the founder and CEO of Lightmatter, a pioneering photonic-computing company that is redefining AI infrastructure. An MIT-trained engineer and scientist, he won the MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award and holds numerous patents on revolutionary photonic technologies. His prolific research—published in top-tier journals such as Nature—has seeded new fields in photonic AI interconnects, processor design, and quantum computing. Under his leadership, Lightmatter has rapidly become the industry benchmark for ultra-fast photonics for connecting AI supercomputers.
Charles Alpert
AI Fellow
Cadence
Charles (Chuck) Alpert is Cadence’s AI Fellow and drives cross-functional Agentic AI solutions throughout Cadence’s software stack. Prior to this, has lead various pioneering teams in digital implementation, including Global Routing, Clock Tree Synthesis, Genus Synthesis, and Cerebrus AI. Charles has published over 100 papers and received over 100 patents in the EDA space. He is a Cadence Master inventor. He has served as Deputy-Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, chaired the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, and earned IEEE Fellow. He received a B.S. and B.A. Degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA.
David Glick
Senior Vice President, Enterprise Business Services
Walmart
David Glick serves as the senior vice president of Walmart’s Enterprise Business Services. He leads enterprise systems, including People Technology Modernization, Finance Tech, Associate Digital Experience (ADE) and Shared Services, that enable Walmart to spend smartly, act digitally and build trust with associates and shareholders.
Before joining Walmart, David served as the chief technology officer for Flexe, a logistics and supply chain technology provider. There, he was responsible for building the foundational technology that allows for an open logistics network to optimize the delivery of goods. Prior to that, he was vice president of fulfillment and logistics tech for Amazon, where he was responsible for all the technology inside the walls of Amazon’s fulfillment centers, as well as the founding tech vice president of Amazon Logistics.
David has over 20 years of experience in enterprise tech, product development, system architecture and logistics and fulfillment tech.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of South Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Atif Rafiq
Founder
Ritual
Atif is the former Chief Digital Officer at McDonald’s and past President at Volvo and MGM Resorts. He’s now the founder of Ritual, an AI-powered platform helping organizations scale structured, intelligent decision-making.
With a track record of leading digital transformation at the highest level, Atif brings valuable insight into how large enterprises adopt and scale AI effectively.
Atif has created over 500 billion dollars in enterprise value and advises cutting-edge companies like SpaceX and Anthropic.
Pankaj Dugar
SVP & GM, North America
AI21 Labs
Pankaj is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of North America for AI21 Labs - a leader in generative AI and Large Language Models, with the mission to bring reliable Generative AI solutions to the enterprise.
Previously, he was the Vice President of Product and Data Partnerships at Databricks where he built over 100 successful partnerships from the ground up.
Prior to Databricks, he led the Google Cloud Platform team responsible for its largest, and most strategic cloud partnerships.
He has over two decades of experience holding leadership roles in sales and corporate strategy at large multinational technology and management consulting firms, including Oracle, Cisco and McKinsey.
Pankaj graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in CS and has an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Bryan Hanks
Shareholder
Greenberg Traurig