TORONTO, January 4, 2024 – Untether AI®, the leader in energy-centric AI acceleration technology, today announced Board of Directors and senior leadership appointments as it enters a new phase of growth. Chris Walker, previously President of Untether AI, has been appointed as CEO. Dr. Amir Salek, former head of Silicon for Google Technical Infrastructure and Google Cloud and current Senior Managing Director at Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. (“Cerberus”), has joined Untether AI’s Board of Directors and as a Senior Technical Advisor to the company. In addition, these appointments come amid an unprecedented explosion of machine learning and generative AI use cases, and as Untether AI’s next-generation AI inference accelerator, the speedAI® family, is in fabrication and on track to sample in the first half of this year.
Mr. Walker joined Untether AI as President in 2023 from Intel Corporation, where he was Corporate Vice President and General Manager. At Intel, Mr. Walker oversaw the business’ Mobile Client Platforms encompassing SoCs, wired and wireless products. He was instrumental in driving P&L and strategy across engineering, products, customers, and ecosystem partnerships, and grew Intel’s largest business line to over $25 billion. He also led from vision through scale the transformation of laptop innovation through Project Athena and the creation of the Intel® Evo™ platform.
“2024 is the year we’ll see artificial intelligence being deployed at scale, necessitating better approaches to energy consumption and power,” said Mr. Walker. “With over 1,400 optimized processors computing At-Memory, the speedAI240 device represents the next generation of efficient AI acceleration for LLMs to the performance and accuracy needed for vision analytics. We’re seeing strong demand for the device’s capabilities and have already received pre-production orders. It’s an exciting time for Untether AI to see the customer response and anticipation for speedAI® in the first part of this year. I’m thrilled for the opportunity to lead Untether AI on its next phase of growth and to have Amir be part of our leadership.”
“Intel Capital invested in Untether AI from an early stage, and with their next generation at-memory speedAI solution in fabrication, I am even more excited for the company’s future,” said Saf Yeboah-Amankwah, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Intel Corporation. “I send my heartfelt congratulations to Chris as he leads Untether AI into their next stage of growth in architecture.”
Dr. Salek started and led multiple lines of products that today are part of the de facto infrastructure behind Google services. Over the past two decades, Dr. Salek has led the development of products for a wide range of markets such as machine learning, networking, graphics, video, and mobile processors. Prior to Google, Dr. Salek was a Senior Director of Engineering at Nvidia, where he was the Founder and head of Nvidia’s System-on-a-Chip Design organization. Dr. Salek holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
“The rise of AI compute workloads requires a radical re-thinking of how compute is done, which is what Untether AI is pioneering with its energy efficient, scalable solution for AI applications,” said Dr. Salek. “I’m looking forward to engaging with the company at both the strategic and technical level.”
“Untether AI is at the forefront of creating a new approach to highly efficient AI inference solutions. This is an imperative for scaled AI customer deployments in the data center, cloud, at the edge, and embedded solutions from Machine Learning to Generative AI,” said Dr. Shaygan Kheradpir, technology executive, Untether AI Board member, and Senior Managing Director at Cerberus. “Amir and Chris bring unique and unparalleled leadership experience in delivering innovative solutions and results at the highest levels of scale with partners.”
Outgoing CEO Arun Iyengar, who will continue to support the company during the transition, commented: “I’m gratified by Untether AI’s accomplishments over the past five years. We’re shipping runAI® devices, the world’s first at-memory compute device for AI acceleration, taped-out our second generation speedAI® devices, and have put in place a team ready to take the company to its next level of growth and success.”
About Untether AI
Untether AI® provides energy-centric AI inference acceleration from the edge to the cloud, supporting any type of neural network model. With its at-memory compute architecture, Untether AI has solved the data movement bottleneck that costs energy and performance in traditional CPUs and GPUs, resulting in high-performance, low-latency neural network inference acceleration without sacrificing accuracy. Untether AI embodies its technology in runAI® and speedAI® devices, tsunAImi® acceleration cards, and its imAIgine® Software Development Kit. Founded in Toronto in 2018, Untether AI is funded by CPPIB, GM Ventures, Intel Capital, Radical Ventures, and Tracker Capital. More information can be found at www.untether.ai.
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