Who really shapes the future of AI? Look to the builders.
Our team was onsite in San Francisco on November 7 at AI Infra Summit, a one-day conference gathering architects, founders, investors, and leaders in artificial intelligence to discuss the next wave of AI infrastructure.
Hosted by Ignite, an organization serving as the GTM engine for AI-native and deeptech companies, AI Infra Summit welcomed 600+ attendees for its fourth iteration at the bright and lively Convene 100 Stockton in Union Square. Speakers from enterprises, AI-native startups, and hyperscale companies decorated the agenda—featuring companies such as Meta, WEKA, Google, Microsoft, K2X Capital, Creatify AI, AWS, and more.
From data centers and GPU to energy and microgrids, the program tackled conversations around how to keep up with model demand by addressing the hardware, software, power, and policy that shape the scaling of AI. The day was filled with deep-dive panels, solo discussions, partner breakouts, and dev-led sessions.
Some key sessions and themes that echoed throughout the day:
The State of AI Infra
Bill Barry, CEO at Ignite, delivered a strong opening session calling out the critical areas companies must align in order to keep up with the next decade of innovation: compute, capital, and energy. The physical and digital infrastructure of scaling intelligence is running at full speed—proving that the real work of AI happens below the model layer.
Building AI Factories for Optimization & ROI
As AI continues to scale, the focus has shifted far beyond acquiring the right hardware. Carl Brown, General Manager-Sales & Business Development at Supermicro; Darrick Horton, Co-Founder and CEO at TensorWave; Duncan Ng, VP of Solutions Engineering at Vultr; and Kyle Sosnowski, VP of Engineering-Cloud at Crusoe, took to an engaging panel to discuss how modern AI clusters are being built in order to produce real business value. They shared insights on designing data centers for both performance and profitability, two elements key to building the most efficient AI factories to come.
Code to Cloud: Town Hall
In a discussion moderated by SemiAnalysis Head of AIUR Wei Zhou, this panel featured Thomas Jorgensen, Senior Director-Technology Enablement at Supermicro; Erik Norden, Chief AI Strategy Officer at Zyphra; and Ted Marena, Business Development Director-OEM/ODMs at AMD, shared their perspectives on ecosystem building, liquid cooling solutions, hardware-software interface, and the developer experience when navigating the complete code-to-cloud pipeline. Their discussion brought together key voices across the AI infrastructure ecosystem through a builder's lens.
In addition to a stellar line-up of talks, the event kept attendees engaged by assigning raffle tickets to each badge, calling out winners throughout the day to collect prizes such as iPads and AirPods (you had to be present to win, so attendees flocked to the main stage when winners were announced!).
The evening closed with a happy hour and dinner on the Expo Floor, offering attendees a chance to network, mingle, and meet with exhibitors. Our team was delighted to learn more from the community building the backbone of AI and are eager for the next chapter of AI Infra.
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