Power is the New Name of the Game | The Six Five Summit

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the six five Summit. Excited for this next session that we have.

Assan Kouri. Assan is the CEO President of Anemi Assan. I want welcome you to the event.

It's been a great day so far. I can't wait to have this conversation with you. Thank you.

Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah, we've got a big, uh, you know, number of items related to AI that people are focused on, but one of these big items that maybe needs more attention, doesn't always get the attention, should get more attention is the electrification power management requirements.

You know, I'm reading, um, reports out there that show in certain regions, you know, data center power are available, available energy for data center is reaching near zero. We are parts of the world where, you know, uh, the demand for AI and the scale of data center build outs to do ai, not to mention the edge electrification of vehicles and all these things that you play in are all going to be utilizing so much energy. And yet, I don't hear us talking about as much.

I hear us talking about building larger models, trillions of parameters, and, you know, putting AI on every device and every phone and every PC and more in the data center, new data centers. Just give me the quick background, kind of, you know, this is something you're really focused on it on semi. How are you guys thinking about this problem right now?

And how big of a problem is this? So I'll start by saying it is a big problem. Uh, you hear, uh, a lot of the headlines, all the focus is how much consumption is for these GPUs and, and, uh, uh, uh, systems that are coming up.

But nobody's talking about, okay, that's all great. Now what, uh, now that's on the cloud perspective. Now add to that, this train on the grid already from electrification, uh, that as you add more and more vehicles on, on the road, you're gonna have that intensity, that add on top of that, you know, areas or times in, in the year where the grid, whether it's air conditioning or cooling, uh, uh, larger, uh, uh, facilities becomes even more strange.

So all of these combined are creating a power crunch. Uh, now what, what do we do about that? There are two sections, uh, uh, for it.

You can think first on how do we get power to the building, right? That's kind of the, uh, the first thing that's grid related. There are a lot of technologies that we're involved in, and I'll go a little bit on that.

And then when you get into the building, how do you best utilize it? That's where the efficiency comes in. What we look at from an onset perspective is what I call the sustainable ecosystem.

'cause all of 'em have to be related. It starts with energy generation, energy distribution, energy consumption, whether it's an EV or cloud. All of these have to work together, and all of 'em have to be developed, uh, together.

If one were to sustain. The other, meaning, if you don't have charging networks or the grid is not ready, EVs are not gonna be adopted. If you don't have renewable energy or energy grid that is supporting a AI deployment, AI deployment is not gonna be, uh, uh, to the scope or extent we can do.

So it's a ecosystem as we describe ecosystem inter relay. So getting into, uh, the building back to the first section of the prompt, you have technologies that we also participate in, uh, and resource system where you bring the power close to the consumption site. And so you remove a lot of the intensity from the grid itself by, call it micro griding, you still have to get the power there, whether renewable or, or grid power, but at least now you are in a proximity.

Now, when you go in, that's where a a a lot of the semiconductor also comes in, which is, let me just put it in perspective, 1% efficiency or 1% improvement, which may not seem like a lot from a power perspective, can save enough energy to reduce by one terawatt hour for the year. I mean, just think about the extent of efficiency and power conversion, getting from grid all the way through the GPU, that 1% efficiency can deploy or be reuse either to power homes or to power another AI center that is able to achieve the output battery need. Naan, you know, I want to talk a little bit about power semiconductors in just a moment, but I did want to ask you is how much of a compromise do you see between getting power energy, right?

And, and actually being able to proliferate these technologies, whether it's, you know, I mean, 'cause we're at a very small percentage of, of electrification in terms of, you know, vehicles on the road. We're seeing it grow and it's been very positive. More new designs, new new entrants, new participants, and exciting, uh, exciting, you know, uh, versions of these cars that people are actually really, you know, people that maybe weren't even thinking about electrification are like, wow, that looks great, drives great, it's all getting in the right direction.

Same time, I hear this insatiable appetite that's going on in the market for next generation, uh, transformer models, LLMs, and not to mention like other ai, which we've forgotten about, but that is really important to doing a whole lot of different tasks. Can we balance this? Like, is your take is, is this something that can be achieved?

Because it's kind of been odd to me how we were very focused on sustainability and then all of a sudden AI comes out and you're hearing a lot less about sustainability because it almost is a diametrically opposed force right now for the tech industry to try to manage carbon and at the same time execute on what customers want from ai. Yeah, I say, look, I I don't think it's it's one or the other. I think we can, uh, uh, achieve both the question.

The variable here is time. It's not the level meaning, uh, uh, how fast can we deploy these, uh, uh, things because look, already the industry is, and has been solving this problem of, uh, renewable energy as a source to power even for electrification of vehicles already. You know, I talked about micro griding.

Look, we all know the grid is not gonna be able to support it as is. And if we sit here and talk about how the grid is going to be upgraded in order to support, uh, uh, electrification and, uh, uh, AI load, uh, probably not gonna be in my lifetime. Uh, therefore the industry is going about it a different way because of time.

And therefore the time is now, the consumption is now. AI happened very quickly. We're already on this trajectory that we need to accelerate.

Now, from a grid upgrade perspective, that's what microgrid, uh, uh, comes in. Now, whether you microgrid by having a power plant next to an AI center or a renewable, uh, uh, energy capture that gets put on a, uh, uh, energy storage system that's also local. Again, what you want to get rid of is the distance.

What you want to, uh, is, is the losses that you get. So you maximize energy generation to the energy consumption while minimizing losses. 'cause again, I I mentioned the example of 1%.

1% at every step of the conversion adds up to now you can have a bigger deployment with the same energy that, uh, you are otherwise having. That is what we, uh, uh, uh, to focus on. So I don't think it's, it's one or the other.

I don't think we have to sacrifice sustainability, uh, uh, and, and the, the climate, uh, initiatives because we need, uh, and everybody wants, and it's very helpful to get the AI and, and the expansion of the LR models and so on. So, So let's pivot for a minute here, and I appreciate you kind of running that down. I think there's different schools of thought, and given where your business is focused and handling is you are really trying to handle a load problem that a lot of these other, you know, other semiconductors are just, you know, they're all talking power, you know, and performance per wat.

Those metrics haven't changed and they won't change. But, you know, when I hear Jensen talking about 72 black wells in rack, and you start looking at the power consumption of one rack, and then you think about the scale of these systems, you're like, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? So talk about power semiconductors and, and the role that you expect to play and what Onsi is doing to sort of provide a pathway to not have to compromise between having the best capabilities and having world-leading AI technology.

Um, and also at the same time being responsible. And by the way, just managing the situation. I mean, there's part of it that's like wanting to do good, and part of it's just doing what we have to do to keep this tech proliferating at the same time while managing our grid.

Because I don't think you or I are gonna be happy on a a hundred degree summer day. Our air conditioning isn't working. Yeah.

And by the way, the, uh, uh, you can think about a rack requires as much power as an electric vehicle, a premium electric vehicle. Uh, we're talking in hundreds of kilowatts at this point. So to me, I look at it as a entity of consumption, whether it's a car or it's a rack at this point, because you have to, to do the, uh, uh, technology for the same now, how, what, from a semiconductor perspective, what are, uh, uh, the, uh, things we can do in order to help that?

It goes back to the efficiency. Every, uh, I guess every power unit that you don't waste from the entry to the rack to the GPU is a power unit that you can add for another GPU that makes sense. If you say a hundred of month, you can power another GPU and therefore, uh, uh, efficiency is the primary metric.

Uh, that's where we come in. That is at the base of the technology itself. Now, people talk about efficiency, and I've always talked about it, and even in the automotive domain, people think about, well, a semiconductor efficiency or, you know, call it wide vanc would be silicon carbide and, or it could be, uh, silicon, but that's not where efficiency only comes in from.

You have to have the best technology at a dye level, but if you don't have the proper packaging to dissipate that at that, uh, heat, you are going to lose efficiency even for the best semiconductor device. So I look at technology for power as both package, and you have to have both. You have to design both together.

So when they land on a board, you are not having any waste of of energy that you save coming into the chip, but you waste into the, in the chip itself, you know, you save 1% from a technology, then you waste it in heat. Well, guess what? The output hasn't changed, therefore you have to have both.

We are heavily investing in both. That's four point number one. Now, there's a, the packaging itself, of course, it's very easy to say you can have a complicated package and have it large, but what happens on real estate, you know, those racks, you're, you're landlocked.

Yep. And if you think about anything that's landlocked real estate is very expensive. Yeah.

So how Do you maximize real estate with the power density? That's where you have, you know, packaging or constructs that help with that. Yeah.

It's really interesting that you say that too, um, about the, you know, the power, uh, and being landlocked Hassan, because, you know, it's a, it's a, we, I I've talked a lot about how much power we can get to the racks and then the actual racks themselves. And by the way, then the power per rack are all going up by orders of magnitude. So as I sum this up, and we only have a minute left, I really appreciate you running me through this.

Is this is a substantial problem, that it's not a problem that, uh, it, it is, is not only looking for a solution, it needs a solution. We cannot do these two things at, at, at different speed. We have to progress power management and building power semiconductors that deliver efficiency to these racks, to these vehicles, to, you know, basically edge to cloud to device at a really rapid pace.

Because if we keep growing these models and we keep growing the, the, the rollouts of these AI solutions that we don't think about power, we're gonna come to the edge of this pretty quickly. Yeah, That's right. That's right.

And it's our responsibility, you know, as an industry, but also, uh, for Onsi as a leader in, in power semis. And you're seeing more and more products that we're coming out with like our T 10 MOSFET or the 650 volt silicon carbide. So both on silicon and silicon carbide in order to stay ahead of it.

Because what we're working on now is the next generation of, of AI in order to get more out of the, the rack space that we get. Because look, racks has not, have not changed and didn't get bigger, maybe a little taller, but they didn't get bigger as far as, you know, width and, and uh, um, depth. And therefore we have to fit more into it.

And that comes at the core with technology that we're doing here at Honest. Donald, I wanna thank you so much for joining me here at this year's six five Summit. I have a feeling that this is not the last time we're gonna be talking about power when it comes to the, you know, growth of the, uh, overall data center industry, electrification of vehicles, edge to cloud solutions.

I think in every part, you know, the power and, uh, performance per WA metrics will not go away. But the need for innovation, like what you're doing at on Semi to help deliver on the potential of these technologies is going to only become more and more important. And I can't wait to keep, uh, in touch to keep tracking, following and providing our analysis of what you're doing.

But so far, we're very impressed, Hassan, and, uh, hope you'll come back and join us here again on the six five or at next year, six five Summit. Great. Thank you.

Alright, everyone out there, thanks so much for tuning into this session. We've got so much more for you. I'm gonna send it back to the studio.