Rochan Sankar is the founder and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup building networking silicon to move data between the GPUs, CPUs and memory that power large-scale AI. A 26-year semiconductor veteran who ran Broadcom's data center Ethernet switching business before striking out on his own in 2019, he bet the company on a single idea: that AI's real bottleneck is not compute but the plumbing that feeds it. In September 2025, Nvidia paid more than $900 million to license Enfabrica's technology and bring Sankar and much of his team in-house.

Nicholas Harris is the founder and CEO of Lightmatter, the photonic computing company rewriting the rules of AI infrastructure by replacing copper wires with light. A PhD from MIT's Quantum Photonics Lab, he grew up in the redwood forests of Gasquet, California, and turned years of academic research on programmable nanophotonic processors into a $4.4 billion company that has raised over $850 million from investors including Google Ventures and T. Rowe Price. With 87+ patents, 82 publications in Nature and its family of journals, and recognition as an Optica Fellow and MIT TR35 Innovator, Harris is building what he calls the next Moore's Law - not in transistors, but in optical interconnects.