The Hardware Behind AI: Where's the Real Bottleneck?
The Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in San Francisco is hosting a networking session and Dutch–U.S panel on the hardware behind AI's explosive scaling. As demand for compute outruns traditional transistor scaling, the bottleneck has shifted to silicon itself — how fast chips can be designed, how efficiently they're architected, how densely they're packaged, and how precisely they're manufactured. Bringing together established leaders and agile startups from both countries, the discussion explores how complementary U.S. and Dutch strengths across the chip value chain.
Food & drinks will be included during the event.
Companies & Speakers:
Moderator -
Ivo Bolsens – Director of SystemX at Stanford University
He retired from AMD as CTO & Senior VP of Corporate Research and Advanced Development, where he led hardware and software technology development. He came to AMD through the 2022 Xilinx acquisition, having joined Xilinx in 2001 and served as its CTO for corporate research. Before that he was a vice president at IMEC in Belgium, leading R&D in digital signal processing hardware and software and spinning out several successful startups in SoC design tools and wireless systems. He serves on the advisory boards of IMEC and ASML, the engineering departments of San José State and Santa Clara University, and UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and holds a Master's and PhD in electrical engineering from KU Leuven.
Speakers
Anna Goldie – CEO of Ricursive Intelligence
Anna Goldie is Founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. She co-led AlphaChip, a reinforcement learning method published in Nature and used in multiple generations of Google TPUs. She was an early employee at Anthropic and a researcher at DeepMind and Google Brain, where she cofounded the ML for Systems team. She holds a CS PhD from Stanford, and a Masters and Bachelors in EECS from MIT. She was named one of MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35, and TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI 2026.
Hanneke Krekels – VP of Global AI Markets at AMD
Hanneke Krekels is Corporate Vice President, Global AI Markets, at AMD. Responsible for expanding AMD’s strategic vision for AI, driving new ecosystem capabilities and accelerating strategic AI engagements globally across public and private sectors. Previously Hanneke was the Corporate Vice President, CEO Operations. In this role, Hanneke provided strategic operations support, including coordinating customer activities and driving process improvements for AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su.
Prior to this she was the General Manager of the Core Markets Business Unit, responsible for markets such as Automotive, Industrial, Healthcare and Aerospace & Defense. She joined Xilinx (now part of AMD) in 2008, focusing on developing the company’s Aerospace & Defense business. She later successfully started the Test, Measurement & Emulation business. Hanneke has led Product Management and Marketing organizations for companies such as Cypress Semiconductor and Philips Electronics. Winner of the Tribute to Women and Industry award from the Silicon Valley YWCA and the 2024 Diversity Journal’s Women to Watch in Leadership award. She holds a Master of Science in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Michael Lercel – Senior Director of Strategic Marketing
Michael Lercel is Senior Director of Global Strategic Marketing at ASML currently based in Wilton CT. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, and S.B. in Physics from MIT. After graduation, he joined IBM Microelectronics working in positions in advanced photomask development, lithography research, and leading microelectronics equipment strategy. He joined Cymer in 2010 as Senior Director for EUV Product Marketing, and was at SEMATECH in various positions including Lithography Director and Chief Technologist before joining ASML in 2015.
Christina Porter – CEO of Invisix Measuring Systems
Christina Porter is the co-founder and CEO of Invisix Measuring Systems, an Eindhoven-based deep-tech company developing a fundamentally new class of semiconductor metrology. Invisix builds soft X-ray scatterometry tools powered by short wavelength light sources, giving chipmakers the resolution needed to measure the increasingly complex, three-dimensional structures at the leading edge of manufacturing enabling the AI boom. Porter brings 12 years experience developing soft x-ray metrology, including 7 years at ASML before licensing out this technology as Invisix, and a PhD in physics in this field. Under her leadership, Invisix is advancing its first tool from the lab toward the fab, aiming to become the metrology platform for the next era of semiconductor scaling.