Edge AI, Data Centers, and the Energy Transition: Rethinking Where Compute Happens
Join us for a breakfast during San Francisco climate week co-organized by Future Energy Ventures and Cathay Innovation around Edge AI, data centers and the energy transition.
The next AI infrastructure wave won’t just be bigger data centers — it will be millions of smaller ones at the edge of the network, close to energy and close to data. As AI moves from training massive models to running billions of real-time inferences across devices, factories, cities, and energy systems, compute is becoming inherently distributed. Edge AI and edge data centers are emerging as a new layer of digital infrastructure: enabling faster decision-making, reducing network and energy overhead, and unlocking new applications from smart grids to industrial automation. In this session, we explore how distributed AI infrastructure could reshape both the internet and the energy system in the decade ahead.
An opportunity to engage with fellow leaders from the local tech community, exchange perspectives, and better understand how AI is scaling globally — and where impact can be driven next.
The program will include:
8:00am: Welcome
8:30am: Opening of the panel & quick intro on the topic and organizers
8:35am : Panel "Edge AI, Data Centers, and the Energy Transition: Rethinking Where Compute Happens"
Ivan Poupyrev, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Archetype AI
Shalesh Thusoo, Founder and CEO, Tsavorite
Anna Trendewicz, Principal, Future Energy Ventures
Tarun Raisoni, Co-founder and CEO of Gruve
Moderator: Matthieu Soulé, Partner & Head of C.Lab, Cathay Innovation
9:05am: Q&A
9:15am: Networking & breakfast
Bios:
Tarun Raisoni, Co-founder and CEO of Gruve
Tarun Raisoni is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gruve, where he leads the company's mission to deliver scalable, production-ready AI infrastructure and outcome-based AI services for enterprises. With more than two decades of experience in data centers and infrastructure, Tarun has a proven track record of transforming ideas into industry-shaping companies, and today is applying that expertise to one of the most critical challenges in AI: closing the gap between model capability and production-grade inference infrastructure. Under his leadership, Gruve has raised $87.5 million in total funding, and built a full-stack platform spanning AI Infrastructure, Data Foundation, Inference Infrastructure Fabric, and AI Application Acceleration, purpose-built for the era of production AI.
Shalesh Thusoo, Founder and CEO of Tsavorite Scalable
Shalesh Thusoo is Founder and CEO of Tsavorite Scalable Intelligence, a semiconductor company developing next-generation AI processors to improve performance, scalability, and energy efficiency for modern data centers.
He brings over 30 years of experience across processors, networking, and AI infrastructure. Prior to Tsavorite, he founded Tanzanite Silicon Solutions, focused on memory and compute disaggregation, which was acquired by Marvell. Earlier in his career, he held senior leadership roles at Intel, where he built and led a team of over 500 engineers working on custom Xeon and AI products, and at Cisco, where he led the development of a network processor from inception to full production, powering the $20B+ Catalyst switching product line franchise.
Shalesh is a seasoned technologist and entrepreneur with over 20 patents and a track record of building category-defining products at the intersection of compute and networking. His current work focuses on addressing the growing power and cost challenges of scaling AI infrastructure globally.
Archetype AI is a physical AI company building a universal AI brain for the physical world. Founded by former Google scientists and engineers, Archetype AI's world model, Newton, is trained on physical sensor data—enabling machines to understand, reason about, and act in the real world through physical agents that can be deployed on the cloud and on the edge. The company's technology powers intelligent applications across industrial, energy, and infrastructure sectors, turning raw sensor streams into actionable intelligence with dramatically lower compute and energy requirements than cloud-based AI.
FEV Future Energy Ventures is an energy-native venture capital firm backing early-stage companies with digital, scalable, asset-light business models across Europe and North America. We focus on AI-driven, software-first solutions that improve grid efficiency, optimize power flows, and enable demand-side flexibility, industrial and urban electrification, and the integration of frontier technologies into the energy system. We partner only with founders committed to decarbonizing energy while making it more resilient, intelligent, and radically more efficient.
Cathay Innovation is a global multistage venture capital firm investing in founders building transformative businesses across Europe, North America, Asia, Latam and Africa. Its platform connects founders with Fortune 500 partners to help startups scale and transform industries with consumer to enterprise AI solutions. Founded in 2015, Cathay Innovation manages €2.5B+ and has invested in 120+ startups including Chime, Pinduoduo, Glovo, Owkin, Ledger and more.
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