No Priors Ep. 93 | With Akash Systems' Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah sits down with Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell, founders of Akash Systems, a company pioneering diamond-based cooling technology for semiconductors used in space applications and large-scale AI data centers. Felix and Ty discuss how their backgrounds in materials science led them to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in tech today: thermal efficiency and heat management at scale. They explore how Akash is overcoming the limitations of traditional semiconductors and how their innovations could significantly boost AI performance. Felix and Ty also talk about their collaboration with India’s sovereign cloud provider, the importance of strengthening U.S. manufacturing in the AI chip market, and the role Akash Systems could play in advancing satellite technologies. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @AkashSystems | @FelixEjeckam Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:30 What is Akash Systems? 2:12 Felix’s personal path to building Akash Systems 4:45 Ty’s approach to acquiring customers 6:40 Challenges of operating in space 7:54 Live demo on diamond’s conductivity 9:50 Heat issues in data centers 15:38 Heat as a fundamental limit to technological progress 20:44 Akash’s role in the semiconductor market 22:54 Growing diamonds 25:10 Collaborating with India’s sovereign cloud provider 28:15 Importance of American manufacturing for AI chips and outlook on current data capacity 29:45 The Chips Act 31:22 Future of national security lies in satellite and radar tech 32:46 Critical issues in the U.S. AI supply chain 36:34 Deep learning’s role in material science discovery 40:16 The future: AI expanding our possibilities

Sarah GuohostFelix EjeckamguestTy Mitchellguest

Dec 12, 202442mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Diamond-cooled AI servers promise cooler chips, faster compute, safer grids

Akash Systems’ founders Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell explain how lab-grown diamond, the most thermally conductive material, is being integrated directly with semiconductors to cool everything from space radios to AI GPUs. They argue that current data center cooling—fans, liquids, rack-level tricks—only treats symptoms and that physics- and chemistry-driven materials solutions are essential to avoid power crises and performance limits. By bonding synthetic diamond to chips, Akash claims significant temperature drops, better reliability, and headroom to ‘hyper-accelerate Moore’s law’ for AI workloads. The conversation also covers sovereign cloud deployments, U.S. manufacturing and CHIPS Act support, and how AI itself will accelerate materials research and advanced manufacturing.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Attack heat at the materials level, not just with more fans and fluid.

Akash’s thesis is that air and liquid cooling mostly operate far away from the heat source; directly integrating ultra-conductive diamond with chips shortens the thermal path, meaning lower temperatures, less throttling, and higher sustained performance.

Diamond cooling stacks with existing data-center cooling, it doesn’t replace it.

Their servers ship with both NVIDIA’s liquid cooling and diamond cooling, showing that materials-level advances can be layered on top of rack- and facility-level solutions to gain extra thermal and performance margin.

Thermal constraints are becoming a primary blocker for AI hardware roadmaps.

Mitchell points to delays and heat issues in recent high-end GPUs as an early sign that keeping performance doubling every few years will be limited less by transistor counts than by the ability to remove heat from increasingly dense chips.

Diamond-enabled cooling could effectively “hyper-accelerate” Moore’s law for AI.

By reducing thermal crosstalk, the company believes transistor density and GPU operating points can rise faster, potentially shrinking timelines for compute-heavy tasks (like generating feature-length films) from days to seconds.

Sovereign cloud and localized AI infrastructure are major growth vectors.

The NexGen India deal illustrates how countries want AI capacity and data to remain within their borders, creating many regional opportunities for differentiated, high-efficiency infrastructure vendors.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

At Akash, as material scientists, we come in at the periodic table level.

— Felix Ejeckam

If a physics or chemistry approach to solving the heat problem is not used today, the needs of AI data centers will crash the grid as we know it.

— Felix Ejeckam

Everything you mentioned is heat… unless you go to the source of the problem, you’re really just playing whack-a-mole.

— Felix Ejeckam

We think that with our diamond technology, we will be able to hyper‑accelerate Moore’s law.

— Felix Ejeckam

We are limited by our ability to frame the questions… only by our own imagination really.

— Ty Mitchell

Akash Systems’ diamond-based cooling technology and materials-science approachThermal challenges in AI data centers and limitations of current cooling methodsFrom space applications and high-power RF to AI GPUs and serversSystem-level integration, market strategy, and partnerships (e.g., NexGen, Raytheon)U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, CHIPS Act, and national security implicationsSovereign cloud and data localization as an AI infrastructure trendUsing AI to accelerate materials discovery, design, and manufacturing

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