The Compute 100

Afleveringen

1. The Compute 100: Timothy Arcuri, Managing Director at UBS

   3 november 2026 · 1 uur 11 min

   Afspelen
   Today’s guest is Timothy Arcuri, Managing Director at UBS. Lees meer

   Timothy leads UBS' Equity Research efforts in semiconductors and semiconductor equipment in the US region. A former process engineer, Tim began his Wall Street career in 1998 and has spent nearly three decades studying chipmakers and their supply chains.

   Timothy has been covering the semiconductor landscape for over 20 years. His expertise is unmatched.

   Across the compute stack, we discuss:

   - The power and revenue needed to support semiconductor growth expectations

   - Who will pay a premium for faster inference

   - How hyperscalers balance Broadcom’s full-service model with greater control over chip design and memory procurement

   - What Cerebras’s OpenAI deal means for its cloud and hardware business model

   - Where equipment, packaging and materials create openings for startups

   - Political backlash and the industry’s dependence on a small number of customers

   Timestamps:

   0:00 Introduction

   1:13 Can power keep up with semiconductor expectations?

   7:55 From process engineering to Wall Street

   12:40 Measuring AI demand and pricing faster inference

   18:44 How AI is changing semiconductor research

   21:12 NVIDIA, AMD and Intel

   24:31 Custom chips, Broadcom and MediaTek

   28:57 Inference startups and Cerebras’s business model

   33:22 Micron, HBM and the memory cycle

   38:54 What long-term memory contracts change

   45:50 Equipment, packaging and fab economics

   53:56 Where new compute companies can compete

   1:02:27 Cobots, humanoids and demand for chips

   1:03:57 Political backlash and customer concentration

   1:08:07 NVIDIA’s installed base and what gets cut in a downturn

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams ac…

2. The Compute 100: Barun Kar, CEO, and Rajiv Khemani, Executive Chairman at Upscale AI

   21 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 4 min

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   Today’s guests are Barun Kar, CEO, and Rajiv Khemani, Executive Chairman at Upscale AI. Lees meer

   Barun and Rajiv are multi-time founders in networking silicon. Between them they helped build Cavium, Innovium, Palo Alto Networks and Juniper’s MX series before co-founding Auradine, where they incubated Upscale AI before spinning it out. Upscale builds the switch silicon, systems and software that connect AI chips to each other using open standards.

   We dig into why AI clusters need a network built around memory reads and writes between chips, not the packet switching that cloud networks were designed for, and why Barun and Rajiv chose open standards over a proprietary fabric like NVLink. They explain how a networking startup works with hyperscalers on their custom chips, why it sells complete systems to new clouds and enterprises, and how the AI buildout could make networking a trillion dollar market.

   From switch silicon to supply chains, we discuss:

   How scale-up and scale-out networks work

   Where copper, optics and optical switches fit

   Why open standards matter for AI chips

   What a network operating system does

   How Upscale secures its supply chain

   Building culture while scaling to 300 people

   Timestamps:

   0:00 Introduction

   1:05 Why AI needs a new network

   5:21 Why cloud-era chips fall short for AI

   9:05 Scale-up and scale-out inside an AI rack

   14:47 The Auradine spin-out and Upscale’s founding story

   19:30 Memory semantics versus packet switching

   26:14 From Cavium and Palo Alto Networks to Upscale

   30:50 Competition and the system-level advantage

   34:19 What a network operating system does

   35:24 Optics and optical switching

   40:33 Selling to hyperscalers, new clouds and enterprises

   46:04 How big AI networking could get

   49:04 Securing supply across the chain

   53:31 Building at the forefront of AI

   56:17 Beyond networking: what comes next

   1:02:23 Building culture in a fast-growing company

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused…

3. The Compute 100: Jascha Achterberg, Co-Founder & CTO, Callosum

   13 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 10 min

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   Today’s guest is Jascha Achterberg, co-founder and CTO of Callosum. Lees meer

   Jascha started with his Cambridge PhD collaborator Danyal Akarca (CEO), London-based Callosum is building infrastructure that matches complex AI workloads to specialized models and chips. The company has raised a $100 million seed round led by Atomico, with significant participation from Plural, DCVC, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.

   Jascha’s bet is that the future of compute is heterogeneous: different chips working together on different parts of a problem. We’ll dig into the commercialization opportunity: discover where each architecture excels, help chipmakers find production workloads, and let enterprises adopt new compute without replacing the stack they already trust. It is all in pursuit of faster, cheaper, and more capable computing systems, which is the biggest prize in infrastructure today.

   Beyond the multichip future, we discuss: What neuroscience taught Jascha about designing computing systemsHow chipmakers discover what their hardware is best atWhere thermodynamic, biological, and quantum computing could fitHiring people who welcome having their ideas challengedBuilding an AI infrastructure company in London

   Timestamps:

   0:00 Introduction

   2:55 What heterogeneous computing actually means

   11:02 From PhD research to Callosum

   18:36 Turning heterogeneous compute into a product

   23:24 Sourcing compute and working with chipmakers

   28:53 Matching workloads to the right hardware

   34:24 What heterogeneous computing can do today

   38:29 The next waves of chips

   48:02 Building the team

   51:33 Why build in London?

   56:11 Helping enterprises upgrade their compute stacks

   1:01:04 Fundraising and building momentum

   1:03:40 Where specialization wins, and where it doesn’t

   And a few links mentioned in the show:

   Callosum’s recent results on heterogeneous inference deployments: https://www.callosum.com/blog/programmable-heterogeneity

   Blog post on Callosum’s theoretical research on heterogeneity acros…

4. The Compute 100: Austin Lyons, Analyst & Writer, Chipstrat

   6 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 6 min

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   Today's guest is Austin Lyons, the writer behind Chipstrat. Lees meer

   Austin started his career as an engineer — graduate work in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois under semiconductor physicist Eric Pop, followed by time at Intel. From there, he made the shift to analysis and writing, building Chipstrat into one of the most widely-read independent newsletters covering semiconductors, optics, networking, and physical AI. Austin is one of those rare people who can actually read the silicon and explain the market. When people want to know what is really happening in the compute stack, Austin's work is where many of them turn first.

   We're excited to have him on for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the chip industry.

   Austin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinlyons/

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

   Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

   Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.

   This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

5. The Compute 100: Naveen Rao, Co-founder & CEO of Unconventional AI

   23 september 2026 · 1 uur 9 min

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   Today's guest is Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI. Lees meer

   Naveen has built two startups before Unconventional AI, both at critical inflection points in the AI market, often early to trends the world had yet to see. He founded Nervana, acquired by Intel for over $400M, then MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3B, after which he led AI at Databricks. Now he's after his magnum opus: chips inspired by the architecture of the brain that can run AI at a fraction of today's energy cost. As power becomes the defining constraint on scaling AI, Naveen's thesis is that biology-scale efficiency is the only path forward.

   Unconventional AI launched with nearly half a billion dollars at a $4.5B valuation — one of the largest seed rounds ever, backed by Lightspeed, a16z, Sequoia, Lux, DCVC, and Jeff Bezos. Our conversation covered Naveen’s career, the market moment for Unconventional, their early product releases, and his belief that the future of compute will mirror how the physical world computes. Thank you Naveen for joining us!

   Naveen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naveengrao/

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

   Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

   Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.

   This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expresse…

6. The Compute 100: Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos

   24 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 1 min

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   Today's guest is Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos. Lees meer

   Patrick's path into chips started at age nine, when a neighbor taught him to build radios from Radio Shack kits and handed him a college EE textbook, which Patrick read cover to cover, homework included. He later double-majored in physics and EE, then did his PhD at Duke under David R. Smith, the physicist who built the first real invisibility cloak out of metamaterials.

   As Patrick puts it, "there's no market for cloaks." But the trick behind them, engineering materials smaller than the wavelength of light, became the seed for Neurophos. The company shrinks optical modulators 10,000x smaller than what's on the market, packing a million onto a fingernail-sized chip instead of one the size of a card table. That density powers Neurophos's T100 optical processing unit, which aims for 50x more compute per wafer. Neurophos closed a $110M Series A backed by Microsoft's M12 earlier this year. We're thrilled to have Patrick on the podcast for a conversation about the physics case for optical over digital compute, why he's targeting the prefill half of inference over decode, and what it will take to make photonics real at data center scale.

   Patrick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ptbowen/

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

   Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

   Follow us on X (https://x.com/thecompute100) and check out our daily newsletter (https://newsletter.thecompute100.com/).

   This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an …

7. The Compute 100: Alex Ksendzovsky, CEO, and Jon Pomeraniec, COO of The Biological Computing Company

   30 juli 2026 · 55 min

   Afspelen
   Today's guests are Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec, co-founders of The Biological Computing Company (TBC). Lees meer

   Check out the demo here! www.tbc.co/demo

   Alex and John are both neurosurgeon-neuroscientists who met about fifteen years ago and have done nearly everything together since. Alex is the godfather to John's two kids and signed his wedding documents, in Russian. The idea for TBC traces back to Alex's time as a philosophy student, when he pitched his neuroscience professor on encoding the S&P 500 into a dish of living neurons to predict the stock market. The professor said no. Years later, once they were both practicing neurosurgeons, Alex and John ran the experiment anyway. The market prediction didn't pan out, but it proved something bigger: that real-world data could be encoded into living neurons, processed, and decoded back out again. That became the premise for TBC: growing neurons on dishes wired to thousands of electrodes and deriving learning principles from them to make today's AI models faster, cheaper, and more efficient. The company came out of stealth this year having raised $50M at seed, grown from 5 people to 25, and signed its first paying customers for a neuron-derived video generation model. We're thrilled to have Alex and John on the podcast for a conversation about building the first company with real commercial access to biological compute, why the brain is still the best computer ever built, and what it will take to eventually put neurons directly in the compute loop.

   Alex: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-ksendzovsky-31732711/

   Jon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pomeraniec-785a294/

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to team…

8. The Compute 100: Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital.

   22 juli 2026 · 57 min

   Afspelen
   Today's guest is Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital. Lees meer

   Shahin's path into venture started with a failed startup. After a PhD at UCLA designing low-noise amplifiers to capture brain signals, he bootstrapped a wireless biosignal monitoring company and learned the hard way that hospitals wanting a product and hospitals paying for one are very different things. A mentor told him he should raise venture money next time – his response: "What's venture capital?" With no network to speak of, he cold-emailed a list of VC firms offering to scout semiconductor deals. Lux Capital, the first hit on a Google search for "nanotechnology venture capital," wrote back the same day, and he joined full-time in 2006. Nearly 20 years later, he's one of the firm's most active investors in deep tech, backing companies like Majestic Labs, Cognichip, and Unconventional AI. Lux just closed Fund IX at $1.5B, its largest ever, bringing total AUM to roughly $7B. We're thrilled to have Shahin on the podcast for a conversation about the semiconductor cycle, the case for younger founders in chips, and the shrinking universe of venture-scale outcomes.

   Shahin: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahinf⁠ Lux Capital: ⁠https://www.luxcapital.com/⁠

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

   Primary: ⁠https://www.primary.vc/⁠

   Follow us on X (⁠https://x.com/thecompute100⁠) and check out our daily newsletter (⁠https://newsletter.thecompute100.com/⁠).

9. The Compute 100: Chase Lochmiller, CEO of Crusoe

   9 juli 2026 · 1 uur 17 min

   Afspelen
   Today's guest is Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe. Lees meer

   While climbing mountains with his best friend turned co-founder, Chase first learned about gas flares — spots around the world where energy was virtually free. In 2018, the vision was clear: co-locate small data centers next to these flares, mine bitcoin, and scale. But while Crusoe grew its mining business, Chase's core long-term motivation was a side project — using low-cost, clean energy to power compute for AI. Fast forward to 2026: Crusoe is worth over $10B, has sold its bitcoin business, and is building one of the largest data centers in the country in Abilene, TX as part of OpenAI's Stargate project. With over several gigawatts of capacity under management and a newly launched managed inference platform, Crusoe is one of today's most formidable vertically integrated infrastructure companies. Chase sits at the intersection of the two most important markets of our time — energy and compute — and was spectacularly early to the insight that they're intrinsically linked. We loved this conversation with Chase, and hope you do too.

   Chase: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chase-lochmiller-604483341/

   The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

   Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

   Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.

   This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or ac…

10. Jeff Tatarchuk, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of TensorWave

    17 juni 2026 · 55 min

    Afspelen
    Today's guest is Jeff Tatarchuk, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of TensorWave. Lees meer

    Jeff is a serial entrepreneur who has spent his career building in the cloud and compute space. Before TensorWave, he co-founded VMAccel, an early FPGA cloud and edge provider, alongside his eventual TensorWave co-founder Darrick Horton. In 2023, Jeff found himself in a convo with someone looking for access to GPUs, to which Jeff posed a simple question – “how about AMD?”. The answer – an immediate “I will take anything!” – resulted in what has become Tensorwave. The company was built on a contrarian bet: that the AI world needed a serious alternative to Nvidia. TensorWave runs exclusively on AMD's hardware and ROCm software stack, and that wager is paying off. The company now operates one of the largest AMD-based AI training clusters in North America and recently raised a $350M Series B at a $1.55B valuation, co-led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, bringing its total funding to roughly $493M. We're thrilled to have Jeff on the podcast for a conversation about building an AMD-native neocloud, the case for an open AI compute ecosystem, and the path to scaling the world beyond NVIDIA.

    Jeff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtatarchuk

    The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

    Primary: https://www.primary.vc/

    Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.

    This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this…

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