On this episode of Invested, Michael Eisenberg sits down with Elad Raz, Founder and CEO of NextSilicon, for a deep dive into the future of compute - and why the AI revolution may be bottlenecked by the very chips powering it.
In this technical and provocative conversation, Michael and Elad unpack what it actually means to “reinvent compute,” why today’s dominant architectures from Nvidia, Google, and Amazon may be fundamentally limited, and how NextSilicon is taking a radically different approach—one that replaces traditional CPUs and GPUs with a dynamically reconfigurable chip architecture.
Drawing on Elad’s background in elite Unit 8200 and decades of experience in high-performance computing, he explains why most AI chips are solving for the present—not the future—and why the real breakthroughs may come from entirely new paradigms like dataflow computing. He also shares bold claims about performance, including running workloads up to 10x faster at a fraction of the power, and discusses NextSilicon’s role in building next-generation supercomputers for U.S. national labs.
They discuss:
- Why the world is entering the “age of compute”
- What Nvidia—and the rest of the industry—may be getting wrong
- The real bottleneck in AI: memory vs compute
- Why faster AI often means dramatically higher cost
- The difference between training, prefill, and inference architectures
- Why future AI models may look nothing like transformers
- The economics of chips, data centers, and trillion-parameter models
- How NextSilicon’s architecture could reshape both HPC and AI
Elad Raz is the Founder and CEO of NextSilicon, a deep-tech company redefining high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. A graduate of the IDF’s elite Unit 8200, Elad brings more than 20 years of experience in technology, entrepreneurship, and executive leadership. Before founding NextSilicon, he founded Integrity Project, which was acquired by Mellanox Technologies in 2014. Elad resides in Ramat Gan, Israel, with his wife and three sons.
If you want to understand where AI infrastructure is really heading—and why the next wave may not belong to today’s incumbents—this episode is essential viewing.
Please rate this episode 5 stars wherever you stream your podcasts!
KEY TOPICS
00:00 - Intro - “10x Faster, Quarter the Power”
00:35 - Secret Supercomputer in U.S. Labs
03:27 - “Reinventing Compute” vs Nvidia
05:27 - Why the World Needs Infinite Compute
08:23 - Throwing Away CPUs and GPUs
11:25 - 30x–100x Chip Throughput Explained
12:47 - “What Jensen Missed”
13:00 - Why Dataflow Failed—Until Now
17:23 - Top 500 Supercomputer Reveal Tease
25:22 - Why Faster AI Gets More Expensive
30:33 - “AI Chips Are the Dumbest Idea”
33:49 - Why Transformers Won’t Last
34:02 - “Fastest Compute on Earth” Claim
38:36 - NextSilicon Is NOT a Feature
58:03 - Compute Replaces Food and Energy
RESOURCES
Follow Elad on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eladraz/
Learn more about NextSilicon: https://www.nextsilicon.com/
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Erica Marom
Producer: Sofi Levak, Myron Shneider, Dalit Merenfeld
Video and Editing: Nadav Elovic
Music and Creative Direction: Uri Ar
Content and Editorial: Jackie Goldberg
Design: Nimrod Sapir
