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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They argue that relying on overseas fabs and assembly is risky for both economic resilience and national security, and that CHIPS Act support should foster an end-to-end domestic ecosystem—from materials and chips to racks and data centers.

Both founders expect AI models to mine decades of literature, explore chemical space, and run vast design iterations (e.g., DFT, inverse design), enabling faster breakthroughs in materials like diamond and boosting automated, AI-powered manufacturing capacity.