Christina Olmsted is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads global marketing and PR teams at the epicenter of the AI revolution. With nearly a decade at NVIDIA and 15 years prior at Cisco, she built and championed campaigns that repositioned entire computing paradigms - from Cisco's Internet of Everything brand movement to NVIDIA's AI and accelerated computing narrative. A UC Berkeley dual-degree alumna with a flair for connecting technology to human impact, she operates at the intersection of deep technical product marketing and culture-shaping storytelling.
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Jason Paul is Vice President of GeForce Platform Marketing at NVIDIA, where he has worked since 2003. Over more than two decades, he has led the marketing and launch of every major GeForce GPU generation, pioneered NVIDIA's SHIELD gaming ecosystem, championed GameWorks VR, and now spearheads the company's consumer AI push connecting RTX hardware to over 100 million Windows users. Educated at UCLA and Stanford (MBA), Paul sits at the crossroads of gaming hardware, software platforms, and the emerging era of on-device AI.
Lisa Lahde is Vice President of Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads campaign marketing for priority industries and the Omniverse platform. A veteran tech marketer with roots in social media and community management, she joined NVIDIA around 2016 and has helped shape the company's storytelling around AI, autonomous systems, and the industrial metaverse. She produced NVIDIA's 'I Am AI' docuseries, contributed to Forbes BrandVoice as an AI innovator profiler, and moderated the OpenUSD session at GTC 2024 in San Jose. Outside the GPU giant's orbit, she runs the persona of @JewelryHunter - a longtime indie fashion enthusiast who blogged about emerging jewelry designers.
Sampson Han is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, the Santa Clara-based technology powerhouse behind the GPU revolution driving modern artificial intelligence. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge silicon and the enterprise market, Han oversees marketing strategy for NVIDIA's data center and AI product portfolio - the very infrastructure powering the global AI buildout. He works within one of the most influential technology companies in history, helping define how hyperscalers, enterprises, and sovereign AI initiatives understand and adopt NVIDIA's data center solutions.
Stephanie Johnson is Vice President of Global Consumer Marketing at NVIDIA, leading go-to-market strategy for GeForce NOW, NVIDIA Studio, and SHIELD. With over two decades in entertainment and gaming marketing - from Take2 Interactive to Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment - she joined NVIDIA around 2018 and has been instrumental in scaling GeForce NOW from beta to more than 30 million users. Recognized by the Silicon Valley YWCA in 2024 for outstanding professional achievements, Johnson operates at the intersection of gaming, creative tools, and generative AI, shaping how millions of consumers experience NVIDIA's products.
Anyscale is the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used to train and serve some of the world's largest AI systems. Founded by the creators of Ray at UC Berkeley's RISELab, Anyscale provides a managed compute platform that lets enterprises scale Python and AI workloads across any cloud, with the performance of bare metal and the ergonomics of a notebook.
Armada is a San Francisco-based edge computing company that builds ruggedized, containerized data centers - the Galleon family and the megawatt-scale Leviathan - paired with Starlink connectivity and an AI orchestration platform. Its mission is to put AI and compute everywhere the cloud can't reach: oil rigs, mines, ships, forward operating bases, and remote industrial sites.
WEKA builds a software-defined data platform engineered for AI and HPC workloads, feeding GPUs and CPUs with low-latency, high-throughput storage across on-prem, cloud, edge and hybrid environments. Its NeuralMesh architecture underpins hundreds of the world's largest AI deployments, including model builders, hyperscale neoclouds, and Fortune 50 enterprises.
FlexAI is a Paris-based AI infrastructure company building a 'universal AI compute' layer that lets teams deploy, train, and serve models across diverse GPU architectures and cloud providers without wrestling with the underlying hardware. Founded in 2023 by former Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, and Tesla veterans, it raised a $30M seed round in April 2024 and is positioning itself as Europe's answer to the GPU-as-a-service crunch.
Xscape Photonics is a Santa Clara-based deep-tech startup building next-generation silicon photonic solutions to solve the escape bandwidth crisis inside AI data centers. Founded in 2022 by a team of Columbia University researchers and industry veterans, the company's proprietary ChromX platform and FalconX laser module deliver multi-wavelength optical connectivity that can increase data throughput by 10x while cutting power by 10x compared to conventional solutions. Backed by $95 million in total funding from NVIDIA, Cisco, and others, Xscape is building the photonic fabric that will underpin the next generation of agentic AI infrastructure.
Byung-Gon Chun is the CEO and Co-founder of FriendliAI, and a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University currently on leave. A systems researcher turned founder, he is best known for inventing continuous batching - the scheduling technique that became the default standard in every major LLM inference engine, from vLLM to TensorRT-LLM. His lab published the foundational ORCA paper at OSDI 2022, and he then turned that academic insight into FriendliAI, an enterprise AI inference platform that raised $26.7M and supports over 550,000 models from Hugging Face. With a career spanning Intel, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook, Chun brings rare depth across both research and production AI infrastructure.
Cory Li is the CEO and co-founder of Spellbrush, the San Francisco-based generative AI studio behind niji-journey - the world's leading AI anime art platform built in collaboration with Midjourney. A MIT-trained bioengineer turned AI entrepreneur, Li previously co-founded Benchling (YC S12), the biotech R&D platform that went on to become a unicorn. At Spellbrush (YC W18), he leads a 31-person team building AI-powered anime games and creative tools - from WaifuLabs' anime portrait generator to Arrowmancer, an anime RPG where players design characters using generative AI, to niji-journey's mobile app with millions of users.
Rounak Adhikary is a 23-year-old founder and CEO of ProjectX (YC X26), a San Francisco-based startup building Infinity - the first cloud-native distributed OS that lets users run GPU-intensive apps like Blender, DaVinci Resolve, and Unreal Engine from any browser, on any device, with under 20ms latency and no setup required. Born in Kalyani, West Bengal, India, he started his first tech consulting company at 19, won the World Trade Center Innovation Award at IIT Bombay's Eureka! competition against 17,000+ startups, and went on to represent India at Princeton's Tiger Launch. Backed by Google Cloud and Y Combinator, ProjectX aims to make infinite compute accessible to anyone, anywhere.
Brijesh Tripathi is the CEO and Co-Founder of FlexAI, a Paris-based AI infrastructure startup that raised $30M in seed funding in April 2024. A veteran of NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, and Intel, he deployed Aurora (one of the world's largest supercomputers) and managed 50,000+ GPUs at Intel before co-founding FlexAI to democratize access to AI compute through a Workload-as-a-Service platform that routes AI workloads across any hardware - cloud or on-prem - without vendor lock-in.
Zain Asgar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company building the world's first multi-silicon inference cloud. With a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering focused on GPU energy modeling, Asgar previously led engineering at Google AI (where his work became Google Lens) and founded Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes-native observability platform acquired by New Relic in 2020. At Gimlet Labs, he is tackling one of AI's most pressing infrastructure challenges: making AI inference 3-10x more efficient by intelligently routing workloads across heterogeneous hardware including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, ARM, and specialized accelerators like Cerebras.
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of EdgeCloudLink (ECL), the company building the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered modular data centers. A 20+ year veteran of hyperscale infrastructure at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook/Meta, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure, Bachar co-founded the Open19 open hardware standards project and holds eight U.S. patents. At ECL, he is reimagining what a data center can be - deploying capacity in nine months (vs. the industry's 3-4 years), generating zero emissions, and producing cooling water as a byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells. In May 2024, ECL unveiled the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered AI data center in Mountain View, California, and Lambda deployed the first hydrogen-powered NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems there. ECL's TerraSite-TX1 near Houston is planned as a 1-gigawatt AI factory on 600 acres.
Guido Appenzeller is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on AI and infrastructure investing. A two-time startup founder, he co-founded Voltage Security (acquired by HP) and Big Switch Networks (acquired by Arista), led the team that developed the OpenFlow v1.0 networking standard at Stanford's Clean Slate Lab, served as CTO at both VMware and Intel, and is now one of Silicon Valley's sharpest voices on LLM economics - having coined the term 'LLMflation' to describe the 10x-per-year cost decline in AI inference.
Jensen Huang is the co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA, the company he has led since 1993 to become the world's most valuable semiconductor company and the first to surpass a $5 trillion market cap. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Huang immigrated to the US at age nine, washed dishes at Denny's as a teenager, and built NVIDIA from a diner booth into the engine powering the global AI revolution. His invention of the GPU and the CUDA parallel computing platform laid the foundation for modern deep learning, and his relentless long-term vision has made him one of the most influential technologists of his generation.
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.
Tim Dettmers is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), best known for making large language models accessible on consumer hardware. He created the bitsandbytes library (2.2M monthly installs), co-authored QLoRA - a technique enabling fine-tuning of 65B-parameter models on a single GPU - and pioneered LLM.int8() quantization. With over 18,000 citations across his work, Dettmers has become one of the most influential voices in efficient deep learning, consistently arguing that computational democratization - not AGI hype - is where the real progress lives.
DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform designed for developers, startups, and SMBs, offering simple, predictable pricing and powerful infrastructure from virtual machines to high-performance GPU instances. Known for its community-first approach and Hacktoberfest, it has grown into a $9.4B public company competing with hyperscalers by focusing on usability and AI democratization.
OctoAI (formerly OctoML) was a Seattle-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2019 by University of Washington researchers — including Apache TVM creator Tianqi Chen and CEO Luis Ceze. The company built a generative AI inference platform that gave developers fast, affordable API access to leading open-source LLMs and image generation models, along with OctoStack, an enterprise-grade private AI deployment stack. After raising ~$132M and pivoting from ML optimization to GenAI infrastructure, OctoAI was acquired by NVIDIA in September 2024 and wound down its commercial services by October 31, 2024.
Fireworks AI is a generative AI inference platform founded in 2022 by seven engineers — five of whom built PyTorch at Meta — that gives enterprises fast, cost-efficient, and customizable access to hundreds of open-source models. The company's proprietary FireAttention kernels and speculative-execution engine deliver up to 40× faster inference and 8× cost reduction versus alternatives, while its fine-tuning and model-deployment tooling lets companies own their AI stack end-to-end. With $327M+ raised, a $4B valuation, 10,000+ customers including Samsung, Uber, Shopify, and Cursor, and a $315M annualized run-rate as of early 2026, Fireworks AI has become the go-to inference layer for production generative AI applications.
Baseten is a San Francisco-based AI inference infrastructure company that provides dedicated and serverless GPU compute for running AI models at scale. Founded in 2019 by four ex-Gumroad engineers, the company has grown into a unicorn with a $5B valuation and $585M in total funding, backed by NVIDIA and other top-tier investors. Baseten powers inference workloads for 100+ enterprises including Cursor, Notion, HeyGen, and Clay, offering an inference stack with near-zero cold starts, proprietary networking, and open-source tooling like Truss for model packaging.
Modal (Modal Labs) is an AI-native serverless cloud computing platform that gives developers instant, elastic access to GPUs and CPUs through a clean Python SDK — no YAML, no Dockerfiles, no infrastructure management required. Founded in 2021 by Spotify ML veteran Erik Bernhardsson, Modal enables AI and ML teams to scale from zero to thousands of GPUs in seconds, paying only for what they use. With customers like Suno, Mistral AI, Harvey, Ramp, and Substack, Modal reached unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation in September 2025 and was reportedly in talks to raise at $2.5B just five months later.
RunPod is an AI cloud infrastructure company that provides on-demand GPU compute for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI/ML models. Founded in 2022 by two former Comcast engineers who pivoted their Ethereum mining rigs into AI servers, RunPod grew to $120M ARR with just $22M raised by early 2026, serving 500,000+ developers across 183 countries. Its marketplace model, per-second billing, and support for 30+ GPU SKUs — from consumer RTX 4090s to enterprise H100s and B200s — make it a capital-efficient disruptor to hyperscaler GPU clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure.