Inside the Physical Infrastructure Powering Artificial Intelligence

AI may feel software-driven on the surface — models, prompts, APIs — but beneath it all sits a rapidly evolving hardware stack that determines what’s possible, what scales, and what wins.
The Hardware of AI brings together founders, investors, and operators building and backing the physical systems behind modern AI: compute, chips, sensors, networking, power, cooling, edge devices, and advanced manufacturing.

Hosted at Google’s San Diego office, this event is designed to move past hype and into the real constraints, tradeoffs, and opportunities shaping AI’s next decade.

Why This Matters Now

As AI adoption accelerates, bottlenecks are shifting from algorithms to infrastructure:

• Compute demand is exploding faster than supply
• Energy, cooling, and latency are becoming first-order design constraints
• Specialized hardware is reshaping performance, cost, and defensibility
• Edge AI and real-world deployment require new system architectures

Understanding AI today means understanding the hardware stack that makes it real.

What We’ll Explore

This is not a sales pitch or a product demo day. Expect a candid, high-signal conversation around:

• Where hardware innovation is most critical in the AI stack
• Tradeoffs between general-purpose vs. specialized systems
• The role of custom silicon, accelerators, and edge compute
• How hardware choices affect AI reliability, security, and scale
• What founders should be designing for now vs. what’s coming next

Format

• Short framing discussion to set context
• Moderated conversation with builders and operators
• Curated networking between founders, funders, and technical leaders
• Food, drinks, and time to go deep with the right people

This is intentionally designed to encourage real conversations, not surface-level networking.

Who Should Be in the Room

Founders & Operators

• Building AI-enabled products that touch the physical world
• Working on hardware-software systems, not just models
• Operating in robotics, autonomy, sensors, compute, networking, or edge AI
• Scaling infrastructure-heavy or capital-intensive platforms

Investors & Strategic Partners

• Focused on AI infrastructure, deep tech, or hardtech
• Interested in defensible systems and long-term moats
• Exploring how hardware shapes AI outcomes and economics

Technical Leaders

• Hardware engineers, systems architects, and platform leads
• Teams working on silicon, data centers, edge devices, or embedded AI
• Operators thinking about scale, reliability, and performance in production

Google San Diego

Hosting this conversation at Google underscores a simple reality: the future of AI depends as much on infrastructure and systems engineering as it does on algorithms.

This event is about learning from that perspective — and connecting people building the next layer of the stack.

Rising Tide Partners

Rising Tide Partners (RTP) is an investment and ecosystem platform focused on backing founders building the next generation of technology-enabled systems.

RTP operates at the intersection of capital, community, and real-world execution — convening founders, investors, operators, and institutions around critical technologies that shape how industries are built and scaled.

Through curated gatherings, strategic partnerships, and early-stage investments, RTP helps founders access the right capital, expertise, and networks needed to move complex technologies from concept to real-world impact.