
Gilad Shainer is Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA, where he leads the strategy, marketing, and ecosystem development for the company's networking portfolio — including InfiniBand, Ethernet, DPUs, and interconnect technologies that power more than half the world's top 500 supercomputers. A Technion-trained electrical engineer who graduated Cum Laude at both B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, Shainer spent nearly two decades at Mellanox Technologies before joining NVIDIA via the $6.9 billion acquisition in 2020. He founded the HPC-AI Advisory Council in 2008, which now spans 400+ organizations globally, co-founded the ISC Student Cluster Competition, holds two R&D 100 Awards (2015 and 2019), and has authored or co-authored dozens of papers across IEEE, ACM, and Springer venues. At a moment when AI factories are rewriting the rules of data center design, Shainer is the person making sure the wires — and the protocols running through them — are ready.
The San Francisco Compute Company (SF Compute) runs a real-time marketplace for AI compute. It buys and operates large-scale, vetted GPU clusters - primarily Nvidia H100s wired with 3.2Tb/s InfiniBand - and sells them on flexible contracts, from a single hour to multiple years, that buyers can also resell. By turning long-term GPU capacity into a liquid spot market with transparent pricing, SF Compute lets startups, researchers, and enterprises buy exactly the compute they need without the multi-year commitments that dominate the industry, while pointing toward a future of cash-settled GPU futures.
Ceremorphic is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor startup building energy-efficient AI supercomputing silicon. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Venkat Mattela, the company taped out a first-of-its-kind 5nm HPC/AI chip on TSMC's most advanced node and is applying the same Hierarchical Learning Processor architecture to data center AI, robotics, automotive, and analog-AI-driven drug discovery.