Silicon Valley Events Highlight Innovation from Power to Edge AI

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Last week I had the chance of attending three key events in Silicon Valley – OCP Summit, 2025, Synaptics’ annual Tech Day, and Infineon Technologies’ annual OktoberTech event. What struck me and other people I spoke to is the rapid pace of innovation happening to meet the rapid growth of AI – from the data centers to the edge.

However, that’s quite a generic statement that I have to explain further what I mean. It always bothers many of us in the world of media that we hear AI being used so freely as a term that it’s often difficult to understand what exactly is being referred to. In fact, many startups often say they have to use ‘AI’ in their pitch decks to ensure big investment rounds, because investors like to see they are getting on the AI train.

So the areas I am referring to when I talk about the rapid pace of innovation to meet the rapid growth of AI, and through the lenses of the events last week, is about dealing with the massive amounts of power needed for AI data centers, it’s about breaking down workloads, it’s about the cooling methods, it’s about innovations in areas like advanced packaging to enable efficient use of power, it’s about moving more AI to the edge and not needing to make a connection via the cloud to make things intelligent.

To capture some of the mood of these three events, I caught up with Majeed Ahmad, Editor-in-Chief of EDN magazine, and Jim McGregor, Principal Analyst at Tirias Research, to get their takes on the various events last week which they also attended.

You can watch the video conversation below, where you’ll also see one aspect I haven’t mentioned – a humanoid robot called Ameca at Infineon’s OktoberTech event. In the video, around the 15-minute mark, you’ll see the robot summarizing the keynotes from the morning’s event, which ‘she’ was listening to intently all through the morning at the side of the stage. She listened to Infineon’s Adam White, Nvidia’s Deepu Talla, Addverb Technologies’ Tappan Pattnayak, and Quantinuum’s Rajeeb Hizra and summarizes this in the video. You can see the delays as ‘she’ processes the answers to the host’s question by communicating with the cloud to deliver the answers.

Watch the video here:

In the video, Jim McGregor talks about the significance of the huge attendance at OCP Summit, his key takeaways, and the fact that Nvidia was everywhere, as well as the Arm Total Design news and liquid cooling and 800V DC announcements.

Majeed Ahmad highlights how everyone at OCP was worried about power, and how AI data centers will be able to get the levels of power needed as AI demand grows exponentially in the data center.

Another key theme we all discuss is the notion of collaboration within the ecosystems and the need for open and/or modular standards. Jim McGregor notes that everyone finally realizes they all need to work together as an ecosystem. “Everyone won’t be the best at everything.” And Majeed Ahmad added that there’s a realization that the challenges ahead are huge – for example co-packaged optics, which has a long way to go and needs collaboration as no single company can do everything.

In relation to Synaptics Tech Day, we discuss how edge AI has been talked about for many years, and how fragmentation (in terms of different architectures etc.) has meant  there has been no killer application so far. We also discuss the impact of Synaptics new processor for edge AI launched in collaboration with Google. Majeed Ahmad notes how Synaptics is trying to revive the fortunes of IoT by linking it now with edge AI, so turning the page on IoT. Jim McGregor notes how IoT has now become, with the possibility of ‘open’ edge AI, the ‘intelligence of things’.

Finally the video sees a discussion on Infineon’s OktoberTech event, with humanoid robotics, edge AI, quantum and power being the dominant themes. Majeed Ahmad notes how AI is the predominant theme everywhere, and how Infineon has been able to successfully link the needs of the various strands of AI to its power products. Jim McGregor talks about how everything is about power, not just for data centers, but everything, from the grid all the way to chip level. Majeed Ahmad also highlights the talk from Quantinuum, in which the CEO said quantum is already happening now, and that engineers shouldn’t be complacent.

Silicon Valley thriving better than ever

Having spent a week in Silicon Valley, we also reflect in the video conversation how innovation is thriving in Silicon Valley, and how industry is coming together to address the challenges. In fact Majeed Ahmad goes as far as saying that over the many years that he’s been coming to Silicon Valley, he’d never felt the energy he felt on this visit last week.

I would second that – and this is echoed by an A16z podcast with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, published this week, in which he says, “Silicon Valley is one of the most amazing places in the world. There’s a network of intense co-opetition and learning, invention, building new things, which is just great.” He noted in the podcast that Silicon Valley also has its’ blind spots. He said that the belief in the last few years that everything should be done in software, everything should be done in bits, is a warning, since the AI revolution may come not from what we already know, but from within the Silicon Valley blind spots.

Well we saw it last week, we will see plenty of activity in how we deal with power, how we enable the ‘golden age of robotics’ as Nvidia put it, and how things will become intelligent and quantum will provide new directions.

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See also:

Rahul Patel, Synaptics on Strategy for Edge AI Growth

OCP Summit 2025: Ganesh Srinivasan, TE Connectivity on Scaling Up and Scaling Out AI Data Centers

OCP Summit 2025: Chris Suchoski, Texas Instruments on the Path to 800V DC in AI Data Centers

OCP Summit 2025: Eddie Ramirez, Arm on Leveraging Chiplets For AI Infra