Akash Systems Is Putting Diamonds on GPUs … and It Could Change AI Forever

Marty Hurwitz: Tell us a little bit about yourself and Akash Systems, how you came to this point, and what cool stuff you’re working on.

Pamit Surana: Yeah. Well, cool is the story—and the word of the day, Marty. I have both an entrepreneurial and a corporate background. Earlier in my career, I built and sold a couple of businesses.

Then I went corporate, where I was a senior partner at Accenture and Alvarez & Marsal, two great consulting firms. I helped lead their TMT and digital infrastructure practices. During that time, I worked on about $100 billion in M&A transactions and helped launch many multibillion-dollar divisions for Fortune 500 companies.

So I got to be an entrepreneur inside corporations, which was pretty great. After that, I went back to my entrepreneurial roots and started a fiber broadband company called GigaPower, which was backed by AT&T and BlackRock. We raised a couple of billion dollars, and I was number two there—the chief revenue officer and one of the founding executives.

And currently, the cool opportunity is Akash Systems, where I’ve known the CEO, Felix, for many years. Funny story: We literally met at a picnic bench in Hawaii eight years ago, and here we are today. At Akash Systems, I’m the chief commercial officer and one of the co-founders of the division focused on putting diamonds on GPUs.

And so we’re excited to talk to you today about what we’re doing in that space and, more broadly, at Akash.

Marty Hurwitz: That’s terrific.

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Marty Hurwitz: Yeah, I think the word of the day is cooling. We saw last week that there was some kind of major glitch at Amazon Web Services on the East Coast, and it sounded like it was horrible for a lot of people.

But it was all related to overheating. Is there anything you can tell us about that?

Pamit Surana: Yeah, I think that was the same problem that happened a couple of months ago with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the temperature inside the data center got so high that they had to shut down the entire facility.

And so, whether it’s the trading—which stopped for several hours around the world in that Chicago example—or Amazon, it’s the same concept.

For everyone’s benefit, the inside of a data center is generally—or at least in air-cooled data centers, because there are both liquid-cooled and air-cooled GPUs—around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, about the same as the rooms where you and I are having this conversation.

What data centers, hyperscalers, and their users like to do is reduce the power used to cool the data center and instead use that power to add more servers. So you’re kind of pushing the envelope on how hot it is inside because you’re trying to add that extra server or rack.

And the problem is that when cooling doesn’t work at the GPU, server, or broader system level, you have these shutdowns. So everyone’s trying to squeeze every extra token and every extra FLOP out of a data center. It starts at the server level, and that’s why this is happening.

It just tells you that everyone is trying to get more compute online as fast as possible, and they’re going to find every way they can. So that’s big news, and our diamond-cooling solution goes directly to the heart of that.

In fact, the way our diamond cooling performs, Marty, is that you can get the same level of performance with much less energy. That’s one choice.

So, if you wanted to get 100 tokens, our solution would require 50% less energy to get the same 100 tokens. However, no one’s in the power-saving business right now. They want to get everything they can out of every watt, right?

So what people see with our servers is that, for the same energy, we can actually deliver a staggering number of additional tokens.

So, pretty exciting.

Marty Hurwitz: Extremely exciting. So, basically, you’re saying lower costs and more compute power.

Pamit Surana: Yeah. With more compute power, you get lower costs, but more importantly, you’re getting more revenue. And the cost per token goes down, right?

Because you have a fixed cost for energy and a fixed cost for the server, so the average cost of each unit is now lower, and you get to sell more of it.

So you’re getting both benefits financially.

Marty Hurwitz: Obviously, this is very attractive and especially timely, considering everything that’s happening and being discussed daily in the AI server world. Why is diamond material grown to very precise specifications so important to your solution?

Pamit Surana: Diamond is important and critical because we’re using nature to help nature.

So we’re using the carbon atoms in diamond to decarbonize, or put less carbon into, our planet. Diamond is great for GPUs because it is the most thermally conductive material on the planet. It conducts heat at 2,000 watts per meter-kelvin.

It’s the best heat spreader because of the way its carbon atoms are bonded. We can move heat away from the GPUs and electronics faster and then dissipate it.

And the benefit is that we’ve made the GPU cooler. We feel good that we’re helping the planet because you can get more tokens with less carbon impact. It’s nature using carbon to reduce carbon. It’s kind of nice.

Marty Hurwitz: It’s very nice. So you’re not only solving a problem, but you’re helping the planet at the same time.

Pamit Surana: Yeah. Actually, it’s as green as it gets with carbon, right? We’ve reduced costs and increased revenue, so that’s green in that sense, and you’ve done it while minimizing the impact on nature and the planet.

Marty Hurwitz: Pamit, a day or so ago, we launched our new tech diamond marketplace platform, where buyers at tech product-development companies will be able to search inventory that diamond growers are selling across a broad range of very detailed specifications.

And they’ll be able to interact directly with diamond growers, as well as equipment manufacturers; providers of laser equipment, growing technology, and post-growth treatment capabilities; and even suppliers of electronic subcomponents that use diamond.

So it’s going to be a really detailed supply chain for tech diamond material, and we’re pretty excited about it.

It’s actually going to be called LattiSpec. That’s the new name: LattiSpec.

Pamit Surana: Nice.

Marty Hurwitz: We’d love to hear your thoughts about that, and we’re going to get you on there as soon as possible.

Pamit Surana: Yeah, we’re excited to get on that platform. It was great working with you and having you incorporate our input to make the site great, and we can’t wait to get started.

We look forward to using it to place our orders and purchase diamonds, so we think it’ll be a great option for the industry. We really like the fact that it’s holistic—not just about diamonds, but also all the other components and parts of the diamond supply chain.

So, credit to both of you. You’ve certainly identified a need in the marketplace, and I look forward to seeing it grow and growing it with you.