GigaIO's Alan Benjamin on Data Center Power at the Far Edge

Marc Austin sits down with Alan Benjamin, president and CEO of GigaIO, to trace how a team of Cray and Sun Microsystems interconnect engineers built a PCI Express company, sold its rack-scale scale-up business to d-Matrix, and turned toward one of the most challenging problems in AI infrastructure today: running data center-class compute far outside the data center. They walk through what’s driving physical AI; its uses in the military, mining and other sectors; and the portable systems GigaIO ships with a 100-gig Ethernet switch, as much as five petabytes of storage and no dependence on any single cloud. Host: Marc Austin, founder and CEO, Hedgehog Guest: Alan Benjamin, president and CEO, GigaIO Chapters: 0:00 — Welcome to "The AI Hedge" 0:29 — Founding GigaIO with the Cray and Sun interconnect team 1:49 — Why PCI Express for scale-up and scale-out 2:44 — NVLink, proprietary fabrics and what came before 3:46 — Selling the scale-up business to d-Matrix 4:54 — Sensors, perishable data and the rise of physical AI 6:55 — Military and intelligence at the tactical edge 8:54 — Manufacturing, industrial processing, mining and agriculture 9:39 — Pattern matching, digital twins and local inference 12:03 — The edge as a distributed data center 15:17 — Secure networking and two form factors 16:33 — Multi-tenancy, VPCs and staying cloud independent 19:20 — Bonding Wi-Fi, private 5G and cellular with Mushroom Networks 21:10 — The future of physical AI adoption #edge #GigaIO #physicalai #datacenter #networking #hedgehog #aiinfrastructure