ai-chips
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Michal Siwinski Makes the Invisible Traffic Inside AI Chips Legible
The chips powering AI, cars and data centers are becoming cities in miniature. Michal Siwinski has built a career explaining why their roads, rules and security matter as much as their engines.
Naveen Verma
Naveen Verma is the co-founder and CEO of EnCharge AI and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University. He spent roughly six years de-risking a single, stubborn idea - computing with electric charge stored in metal capacitors instead of noisy transistors - before spinning it out of his lab in 2022. The result is analog in-memory computing hardware that his company says runs AI inference at roughly 20 times less energy than a typical GPU, aimed squarely at putting powerful AI on laptops and edge devices rather than in power-hungry data centers. EnCharge has raised more than $144 million, including an oversubscribed $100M+ Series B led by Tiger Global in early 2025, and shipped its first commercial accelerator, the EN100.
Noah Sturcken
Noah Sturcken is the founder and CEO of Ferric, a New York semiconductor company building the world's smallest, most efficient power converters. A Columbia PhD who turned his dissertation into a company, he pioneered integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) that bury thin-film magnetic inductors inside the chip itself, shrinking power delivery by more than 10x. As AI processors grow ever hungrier for clean, dense power, Ferric's tech sits exactly where the bottleneck is - and partners like Marvell are now building it into custom AI silicon.
Farhat Jahangir
Farhat Jahangir is the Founder, President & CEO of GS Microelectronics (GSME), a San Jose-based semiconductor solutions company he founded around 2021-2022. With 25+ years in semiconductor manufacturing, operations, and chip design, he previously served as VP & General Manager at ON Semiconductor and SVP of Manufacturing at Quantenna Communications, where he helped steer the company through its 2016 IPO and a $1.1B acquisition. GSME raised a $35M Series B in January 2026, backed by Maverick Silicon, and has since made two strategic acquisitions - Sinble Technology Vietnam and Muse Semiconductor - to build a vertically integrated semiconductor services platform spanning chip design, MPW services, and advanced process node capabilities.
Reiner Pope
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, an AI chip startup based in Mountain View, California, designing purpose-built silicon for large language models. A former Google Senior Staff Software Engineer who led AI software development for Google's TPUs and served as Efficiency Lead for PaLM, Pope left Google one week before ChatGPT launched to build what he calls 'the best chips for LLMs that physics allows.' MatX has raised approximately $604M to date, including a $500M Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP, and is building a hybrid SRAM-HBM chip architecture targeting the world's leading AI labs.
Rodrigo Liang
Rodrigo Liang is the co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, an AI infrastructure company he built from the ground up in 2017 alongside Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré. Born in Taipei, raised in Brazil, and trained in electrical engineering at Stanford, Liang spent two decades designing high-performance processors at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle before betting that the entire computing paradigm for AI needed to be reimagined. SambaNova's Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) is the architectural expression of that conviction - chips designed around data movement rather than instructions - and in February 2026 the company announced the SN50, claiming it runs agentic AI 5x faster than competing chips at 3x lower cost, backed by $350M in Series E funding and a strategic partnership with Intel.
Dylan Patel
Dylan Patel is the founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis, a boutique AI infrastructure research and consulting firm he started as a solo blog on his 24th birthday. Growing up working night shifts at his immigrant parents' motel in rural Georgia, he taught himself semiconductor analysis while toggling between RuneScape and chip-geek forums. Today SemiAnalysis has 85+ employees, 260,000+ subscribers, and is on track to surpass $100 million in revenue in 2026 - making Patel one of the most influential voices in AI infrastructure, cited by Jensen Huang at GTC and referenced by Sam Altman.