TechSurge: Deep Tech Podcast

Artificial intelligence is often discussed through models and GPUs. This episode looks beneath that surface, at the power delivery and networking required to make AI work at scale.
Host Sriram Viswanathan speaks with Rajiv Khemani, a serial deep tech entrepreneur whose career has tracked several major infrastructure cycles: internet networking, cloud switching, blockchain compute and now AI networking. Khemani reflects on his early work at NetBoost and Intel, his operating role at Cavium, and the founding of Innovium, which Marvell agreed to acquire for $1.1 billion in 2021. He also explains how work on low-power blockchain silicon led his team toward the infrastructure demands created by generative AI.
The discussion examines why incumbents often overlook emerging markets, why purpose-built hardware can outperform systems inherited from an earlier technology cycle, and how founders decide whether to keep financing a company or sell while the outcome remains attractive. Khemani describes the concentration risk of selling to a small number of hyperscalers, the fragility of semiconductor supply chains, and why leading-edge chip development now demands much larger balance sheets.
The conversation then turns to AI’s emerging bottlenecks. Large models require many accelerators to operate as one computer, making low-latency scale-up and scale-out networks central to performance. The episode explores heterogeneous compute, open networking standards, memory scarcity, AI’s growing electricity demand, and the competition between AI and Bitcoin mining for energy. 

Speaker Profiles and Links

Sriram Viswanathan: Founding Managing Partner, Celesta Capital — https://www.linkedin.com/in/onesriram/
Rajiv Khemani: Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Upscale AI; deep-tech entrepreneur and IIT Delhi alumnus
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivkhemani/
Profile and contribution to the IIT, Delhi, Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence : https://scai.iitd.ac.in/rajiv-khemani 

References Mentioned and Further Reading

Upscale AI : https://upscaleai.com/ 
Upscale AI Launch Announcement : https://upscaleai.com/press-release/ 
Velaura AI : https://velaura.ai/ 
Acquisition of Innovium and cloud data-centre switching rationale, Marvell: https://www.marvell.com/company/newsroom/marvell-to-acquire-innovium-accelerates-cloud-growth-with-expanded-ethernet-switching-portfolio.html 
Cavium combination and infrastructure semiconductor strategy, Marvell:  https://www.marvell.com/company/newsroom/marvell-and-cavium-to-combine-creating-an-infrastructure-solutions-powerhouse.html 
Energy and AI, International Energy Agency: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai
Energy demand from AI, International Energy Agency: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai 
Tokenisation in the context of money and other assets, Bank for International Settlements : https://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d225.pdf 
Leveraging tokenisation for payments and financial transactions, Bank for International Settlements : https://www.bis.org/publ/othp92.pdf 
Collective communication for clusters exceeding 100,000 GPUs, Meta researchers : https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20171 
Load balancing for AI training workloads, UC Berkeley researchers : https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21372 
Reliability in large-scale machine-learning clusters : https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21680 
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System : https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf 

Timestamps:

[Timestamp] Chapter Title
00:00 - Highlights and welcome
02:28 - From IIT Delhi to Silicon Valley
07:50 - Building Through Major Technology Waves
10:19 - Why Incumbents Miss Emerging Markets And Where Start-Ups Win
12:47 - Building Innovium for the Cloud
19:37 - Supply Shocks and Strategic Exits
27:28 - From Bitcoin Chips to AI
30:09 - Bitcoin, Tokenisation and Energy
42:37 - Agentic AI and Future Networks
53:21 - Memory, Capital and Founder Resilience

Canada produces world-leading science, engineering, and AI research. So why does so much of that research still commercialize outside of Canada?

In this episode of TechSurge, host Nic Brathwaite puts that question to four leaders at two of Canada's top research universities: Mary Wells (Dean of Engineering) and Chris Houser (Dean of Science) at the University of Waterloo, and Heather Sheardown (Dean of Engineering) and Gianni Parise (VP Research) at McMaster.

At Waterloo, Mary Wells traces how the university's origin produced one of the world's most influential co-op programs and a creator-owned IP policy that lets inventors keep their ideas, making the school a talent engine for global tech. The group digs into Canada's AI paradox, foundational research and talent but far less of the economic value, and what quantum, robotics, and advanced manufacturing show about getting research to market.

McMaster runs a different model, built on health sciences, nuclear research, and problem-based learning. Heather Sheardown explains the McMaster Method and why it matters in an AI-shaped future. Gianni Parise argues for commercialization as a core university function, with work spanning AI-assisted drug discovery, inhaled vaccines, critical-mineral-free motors, and a campus nuclear reactor that supplies much of the world's iodine-125 for prostate cancer treatment. They also unpack Fusion Pharmaceuticals, the McMaster spin-out acquired by AstraZeneca, and what it reveals about university commercialization.

Together, these conversations ask what universities must become in an era defined by AI, deep tech, national competitiveness, and the urgent need to move ideas from the lab into the world.
Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits and future episodes.
Speaker Profiles and Links
Mary Wells - University of Waterloo Profile: https://uwaterloo.ca/engineering/about/dean-engineerin
Chris Houser - University of Waterloo profile: https://uwaterloo.ca/earth-environmental-sciences/profile/chouser
Heather Sheardown - McMaster Engineering profile: https://www.eng.mcmaster.ca/chemeng/faculty/dr-heather-sheardown/
Gianni Parise - McMaster Experts Profile: https://experts.mcmaster.ca/people/parisegChapters:
0:00 Highlights
0:56 Welcome 
2:39 Waterloo’s origin story 
4:51 Creator-owned IP and the Waterloo model 
7:42 The Co-op Flywheel 
8:56 Canada’s AI paradox: world-class research, slower domestic value capture 
10:21 AI, Regulation, Trust, and Canadian Competitiveness 
17:09 Rethinking the PhD for Commercialisation 
21:43 Inside Waterloo’s labs 
30:14 What Waterloo wants to be in ten years: builders of the country 
32:39 Meet McMaster: health sciences, nuclear capability, and research intensity 
34:12 The McMaster Method 
35:11 Research, Health, and Commercialisation 
40:45 McMaster Labs: Heat, Motors and Health Innovation 
47:13 Bioinnovation, Nuclear Research and Fusion Pharmaceuticals 
58:43 The university of 2035: less lecture, deeper societal impact 

References Mentioned and Further Reading
University of Waterloo Policy 73 - Intellectual Property Rights: https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guidelines/policies/policy-73-intellectual-property-rights
University of Waterloo - Our IP policy: https://uwaterloo.ca/entrepreneurship/our-ip-policy
University of Waterloo Co-op programs: https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/co-op
University of Waterloo - Academy of Research Commercialization: https://uwaterloo.ca/conrad-school-entrepreneurship-business/graduate-students/academy-research-commercialization-arc
Open Quantum Design: https://openquantumdesign.org/
Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo: https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/
CIFAR - Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy: https://cifar.ca/ai/
Government of Canada / ISED - Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/pan-canadian-artificial-intelligence-strategy
Statistics Canada - Understanding Canada’s innovation paradox: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024007/article/00002-eng.htm
Council of Canadian Academies - Innovation and Business Strategy: Why Canada Falls Short: https://cca-reports.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2009-06-11-innovation-report-1.pdf
KPMG / University of Melbourne - Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/ca/pdf/2025/07/trust-in-ai-en-report.pdf
McMaster - Our approach to teaching and learning / Problem-Based Learning: https://provost.mcmaster.ca/teaching-learning/our-approach/
McMaster - Evidence-based medicine: https://fhshrwelcome.mcmaster.ca/did_you_know/evidence-based-medicine/
McMaster Nuclear Reactor - Medical Isotopes: https://nuclear.mcmaster.ca/medical-isotopes/
McMaster Industry Liaison Office - IP and commercialization FAQ: https://research.mcmaster.ca/mcmaster-industry-liaison-office-milo/ip-education/intellectual-property-guides/faqs/
McMaster - AstraZeneca to acquire McMaster-supported Fusion Pharmaceuticals: https://news.mcmaster.ca/astrazeneca-to-acquire-mcmaster-supported-fusion-pharmaceuticals/
Fusion Pharmaceuticals - FACIT investment and CPDC spin-out background: https://fusionpharma.com/facit-announces-investment-in-fusion-pharmaceuticals-and-alpha-emitting-radiotherapeutics/
PubMed - Evidence-based medicine and problem-based learning at McMaster: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31617018/
ScienceDirect - Fifty Years on: The first problem-based learning programme at McMaster:

TechSurge is sponsored by Notion. From product roadmaps to investor updates, Notion is where modern teams plan, write, and ship together. Get started at http://notion.dev/techsurge.
Search began as a way to find pages. AI is turning it into a way to ask, reason, decide, and act.

Search has always been more than a technical problem. It is a way of organising knowledge, connecting intent with information, and increasingly, turning questions into actions. In the age of artificial intelligence, that basic function is being redefined.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Vishwanath speaks with Prabhakar Raghavan, Chief Technologist at Google, about the long arc of search: from the early web and link analysis to knowledge graphs, language models, transformers, Gemini, and the unresolved question of how AI will change the way we find, trust, and use information.
Prabhakar reflects on his career as a computer scientist, researcher, and technology leader, beginning with his time at IBM Research, where he worked on algorithms, optimization, databases, and early information retrieval. He explains how the explosion of unstructured data on the web created a new class of technical and economic problems. Search was not simply about indexing pages; it was about imposing structure on a chaotic information environment and building mechanisms that could connect supply, demand, relevance, authority, and trust.
The conversation traces how early search evolved through link analysis and PageRank, drawing on ideas from scholarly citation analysis, graph theory, and algorithmic ranking. Prabhakar describes why authority and trust became central to search as the web grew, and why users themselves changed alongside the technology. As search engines became more capable, people moved from looking for simple webpages to asking richer, more contextual questions that required intent understanding rather than mere document retrieval.

Sriram and Prabhakar then explore the transition from classical search to AI-infused products. Through examples such as Gmail Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Google Drive recommendations, and knowledge graphs, Prabhakar shows how prediction, context, and language modelling were already reshaping user experiences well before the current generative AI wave. These systems were early signals of a broader shift: computers moving from retrieving information to anticipating what users might need next.
The episode also offers a technical tour of the major algorithmic milestones that led to today’s AI systems, including deep learning, sequence-to-sequence models, attention mechanisms, transformers, and the compute architectures needed to train and serve large models. Prabhakar explains why attention changed the quality of language modelling, why AI systems appear increasingly conversational, and why compute remains one of the central constraints in the field.

At the heart of the discussion is the central tension facing search today: if AI systems can generate answers directly, what becomes of search as we know it? Prabhakar does not frame AI as the end of search, but as its next transformation. The future of search may be less about finding a page and more about understanding intent, synthesising knowledge, reasoning through ambiguity, and helping users complete complex tasks.
The conversation closes with deeper questions about AI world models, hallucination, test-time compute, diffusion models, recursive self-improvement, theorem proving, and whether AI systems can ever reason with the same grounded understanding as humans. For Prabhakar, the challenge is not only to build more powerful models, but to understand their limits, failure modes, and relationship to truth.

This episode is a wide-ranging exploration of how search became one of the defining technologies of the internet age—and how artificial intelligence may now force us to rethink what it means to search at all.
Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits and future episodes.
Links:
Prabhakar Raghavan - Google Research profile: https://research.google/people/prabhakarraghavan/?&type=google
Prabhakar Raghavan - Google blogs and writing: https://blog.google/authors/prabhakar-raghavan/

References Mentioned During the Discussion
Brin and Page - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine: https://research.google/pubs/the-anatomy-of-a-large-scale-hypertextual-web-search-engine/
Page, Brin, Motwani and Winograd - The PageRank Citation Ranking: https://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
Jon Kleinberg - Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/kleinber/auth.pdf
Manning, Raghavan and Schutze - Introduction to Information Retrieval: https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/
 Google - Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not/
Google Help - How Google's Knowledge Graph works: https://support.google.com/knowledgepanel/answer/9787176
Further Reading
Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton - ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Abstract.html
Vaswani et al. - Attention Is All You Need: https://papers.neurips.cc/paper/7181-attention-is-all-you-need
Devlin et al. - BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding: https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/
Chen et al. - Gmail Smart Compose: Real-Time Assisted Writing: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00080
Kannan et al. - Smart Reply: Automated Response Suggestion for Email: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04870
Hoffmann et al. - Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556
 Tay et al. - Scale Efficiently: Insights from Pre-training and Fine-tuning Transformers:

Semiconductors have moved from the background of the technology stack to the center of the AI economy. What used to be a specialized industry discussed mostly by engineers and investors is now shaping the speed, cost, and strategic direction of modern computing.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Michael Marks speaks with Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst covering U.S. semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment at Bernstein Research. Stacy has spent years analyzing the chip industry across cycles, but argues that the current moment feels different in scale: AI demand has created an unprecedented scramble for compute, memory pricing has surged, and companies across the stack are being forced to rethink capacity, architecture, and capital allocation.
The conversation explains the 4 different kinds of semiconductor cycles—supply, inventory, product, and demand — and why Stacy believes the industry is currently in a demand cycle of unusual magnitude. The discussion also unpacks the distinction between DRAM and NAND, why high-bandwidth memory is becoming strategically central to AI systems, and how the physical realities of wafer capacity and silicon area are constraining supply in ways the broader market often misses.
Stacy and Michael also discuss the hardware economics behind the current boom, with Michael pressing Stacy on why compute remains so scarce and how companies are improving performance through packaging and system design. Michael then moves the conversation beyond market headlines to the core business questions: who is actually paying for this compute, which use cases are generating real revenue, and whether AI spending is creating durable economic value or simply shifting costs elsewhere. Together, these questions highlight two of the episode's clearest insights: coding may be one of the earliest AI applications with meaningful willingness to pay, and inference, not training, is the real test of whether the current buildout becomes a lasting business or just another expensive wave of infrastructure.
Stacy explains the concentration of power among the major wafer fabrication equipment players, the rise of ASICs as a meaningful share of AI silicon, Broadcom's rapidly expanding AI opportunity, and the growing role of Chinese companies as new entrants, especially in memory and semiconductor equipment. Along the way, the conversation asks the defining question facing the sector: is this just another semiconductor upswing, or the first true supercycle the industry has seen? Stacy believes that this might be the biggest supercycle he has seen in his career.
Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits and future episodes.
Links:
Stacy Rasgon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacy-rasgon-6924963
Bernstein: https://www.alliancebernstein.com/corporate/en/home.html
References Mentioned During the Discussion
NVIDIA Blackwell Platform: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/blackwell-platform/
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) overview from Micron: https://www.micron.com/products/memory/hbm
DRAM overview from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/dram
NAND flash overview from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/nand-flash-memory
Further Reading
McKinsey on the semiconductor industry outlook: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/the-semiconductor-industry-in-2025
Semiconductor Industry Association: 2025 State of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry: https://www.semiconductors.org
NVIDIA on the Blackwell architecture and AI infrastructure roadmap: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/blackwell-platform/
Broadcom AI investor materials and infrastructure commentary: https://investors.broadcom.com
ASML on lithography and advanced chip manufacturing: https://www.asml.com/en/technology
Micron on HBM and AI memory demand: https://www.micron.com/products/memory/hbmChapters

[00:00:00] — Highlights
[00:00:26] — Welcome to  the Episode
[00:01:29] — Meet Stacy Rasgon
[00:02:01] — Is This the First Real Semiconductor Supercycle?
[00:05:33] — Inside the Strongest Memory Cycle in History 
[00:09:14] — Can Innovation Keep Up With AI Demand?
[00:11:33] — Chiplets, Blackwell, and the New Economics of Compute 
[00:12:37] — What Could Signal the Cycle Is Slowing
[00:14:26] — Vertical Integration at the Hyperscales 
[00:16:36] — The Difference between Apple and Meta
[00:17:15] — What is Vertical Integration Being Done For?
[00:18:15] — Will other bottlenecks develop as This Progresses? 
[00:21:13] — Oligopoly Pricing in the Market
[00:22:22] — Any New Entrants into Memory?
[00:23:46] — Why the Industry Must Pivot From Training to Inference
[00:25:10] — Agentic Coding and the First Real AI Revenues
[00:26:57] — Groq, Low-Latency Inference, and What GPUs Cannot Do Alone
[00:29:28] —-Could The Smaller Companies All be Bought Up ?
[00:30:19] — Why Semiconductor Equipment Matters More Than Ever 
[00:31:00] — How Semiconductor Equipment is Affected by the Cycle
[00:32:55] — A Long Upcycle for Semiconductor Equipment Guys?
[00:33:13] — The Big Five and the Rise of Chinese Equipment Players
[00:34:24] — The Effects of Geopolitics
[00:35:02] — Broadcom’s Quiet AI Breakout
[00:40:46] — ASICs vs GPUs and the Next Wave of Custom Chips
[00:41:06] — Intel, Foundry Strategy, and the Long Turnaround
[00:46:46] —-The Risks the Market May Still Be Underestimating
[00:49:32] — Where Startups Still Have Room to Win
[00:50:39] — What the Semiconductor Industry Could Look Like Next Year

For most of human history, space has been a place we visited. The next chapter may be about building there.
For decades, space was the domain of governments, astronauts, and science fiction. Today, falling launch costs, reusable rockets, and a new generation of ambitious founders are turning orbit into something else entirely: a place to build. The question is no longer whether humanity can construct large-scale infrastructure in space, but what we should build first—and why.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Vishwanath speaks with Dr. Ariel Ekblaw, Founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute, Research Affiliate at MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, and founder of Rendezvous Robotics. Ariel has spent her career exploring one of the most fundamental challenges of the emerging space economy: how to build structures in orbit that are far larger than anything that can fit inside a rocket.
Ariel explains the origins of TESSERAE, her pioneering work on autonomous self-assembling space architecture, and how ideas borrowed from biology, swarm intelligence, and modular construction could unlock a future of massive solar arrays, communications infrastructure, orbital laboratories, and eventually human habitats in space.
The conversation explores the rapidly emerging market for in-orbit infrastructure, including AI data centers in space, space-based solar power, and the technologies needed to support a permanent industrial presence beyond Earth. Ariel breaks down the engineering realities behind these ideas—why cooling data centers in space is harder than most people assume, how autonomous assembly could solve the scale problem, and why the future of orbital infrastructure may look more like a business park than a collection of standalone satellites.
Sriram and Ariel also discuss the broader implications of humanity’s return to space: the economics unlocked by reusable launch systems, the opportunities created by dramatically lower transportation costs, and the second-order innovations that may emerge from building an industrial ecosystem in orbit. Along the way, they examine space debris, stewardship of the orbital commons, artificial gravity, and what it will take to make long-term human habitation in space viable.
At the heart of the discussion is Ariel’s belief that space is not an escape from Earth’s problems, but a tool for solving them. Whether through advanced manufacturing, new energy systems, biotechnology research, or entirely new industries, she argues that the next era of space exploration should be focused on improving life here at home.
Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits and future episodes.
Links:
Ariel Ekblaw on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/arielekblaw
Aurelia Institute:https://www.aureliainstitute.org
Rendezvous Robotics:https://www.rdvrobotics.com
MIT Space Exploration Initiative:https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/space-exploration/overview/
How Aurelia is Designing Self-Assembling Space Stations: https://www.fastcompany.com/91242689/how-the-aurelia-institute-is-designing-a-self-assembling-space-station
Overview Energy (Space-Based Solar Power): https://www.overviewenergy.com
StarCatcher Industries (Space-to-Space Power Transmission): https://www.starcatcherindustries.com
Impulse Space (Orbital Transportation): https://www.impulsespace.com

References Mentioned During the Discussion

Earthrise - The Apollo 8 Photograph: https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/apollo-8-earthrise/
Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”: https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot
Buckminster Fuller Institute: https://www.bfi.org

Watch Ariel’s Talks & Interviews

Aurelia Institute YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AureliaInstitute
Ariel’s TED Talk: https://youtu.be/IHrGK3Mu5K4?si=QwGHq1BEoB-QMUjk
Space Business Podcast - Self-Assembling Space Habitats with Ariel Ekblaw: https://spacebusiness.podbean.com/e/137-self-assembling-space-habitats-ariel-ekblaw-founder-ceo-aurelia-institute/

Further Reading

NASA’s Artemis Program: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis
International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station
Aurelia Institute’s Vision for Humanity’s Future in Space: https://www.aureliainstitute.org
MIT News: Supporting Mission-Driven Space Innovation: https://news.mit.edu/2025/supporting-mission-driven-space-innovation-aurelia-institute-0710

Timestamps:
[00:00] Highlights
[00:34] Welcome to the Episode
[02:33] The New Space Race Begins
[04:10] Meet Dr. Ariel Ekblaw
[06:30] Why We Explore Space? 
[12:53] How She Discovered Self-Assembly at MIT 
[17:10] How TESSERAE Tiles Build Themselves
[20:14] How the Tiles Coordinate Like a Swarm
[24:47] Repairing and Reconfiguring Structures in Orbit
[28:32] Why the Space Industry Is Exploding Now
[34:25] The Case for AI Data Centers in Space
[45:21] How Much Compute Will Move to Space?
[48:40] Why This Space Era Is Different
[52:24] The Growing Problem of Space Debris
[55:14] Building the Next SpaceX
[57:27] What Could Go Wrong in Space?
[59:33 ] How Many Hours of Gravity Do Humans Need?
[01:00:38] Why We Should Build in Low Earth Orbit First
[01:05:09] Should We Really Colonize Mars?
[01:11:27] Could You Commute to Space for Work?
[01:13:50] Who Makes the Rules in Space?
[01:22:30] What's Overhyped and Underhyped in Space
[01:26:57]What's the Real Story in Space?