Building Compute Foundations for the Physical Economy - with Drew Henry of ARM

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
This is Daniel Faggella, you're tuned in to the AI in Business Podcast. This is another bonus episode from our New AI Infrastructure Podcast, which is a separate show on iTunes, on Spotify, anywhere where you can listen to audio. Our guest is Drew Henry. He is the Executive Vice President for Physical AI at ARM. It's ARM, a very, very large hardware company. Drew speaks with us this week about the implications of new AI and data foundations in the physical world. We're talking about logistics, manufacturing, transportation, other asset-heavy environments. Obviously, ARM is not building the robots, but they're building the compute that the robots are running on. And there's all kinds of new concerns around power, reliability, integration, that specifically apply to the physical world. Just like we're seeing everybody's laptop wake up with intelligence, we're about to see construction sites and transportation and manufacturing plants wake up with intelligence. But some of those infra concerns are a little different. Safety is a bigger deal. In some cases, some elements of sustainability are a bigger deal, and Drew touches on all of that. So we're about to fly into that episode, but I want to mention again, this is from our AI Infrastructure Podcast. If you're interested in the new foundations of the enterprise, that is to say, hardware, data storage, compliance, data platforms, and really enterprise-wide, infra level concerns. If you want to listen to the same things that other infrastructure and AI leaders in the Fortune 500 are tuned into, then check out the AI Infrastructure Podcast. It's emerj.com/inf1.
That's INF like infrastructure, and then the number one, emerj.com/inf1, and check out the AI Infrastructure Podcast. Again, if you're looking to get kind of the cutting edge of what other infra and AI leaders are thinking about, we have massive names coming up on that show. We have the Chief Revenue Officer of Google Cloud. We have leadership from Nokia, C-level from gigantic corporations giving us their take on infrastructure.

**Drew Henry** (2:01)
Be sure to check out that show.

**Daniel Faggella** (2:02)
I'll mention again in the outro, but without further ado, let's fly into this episode with Drew Henry of Arm during the AI in Business Podcast. So, Drew, welcome to the show.

**Drew Henry** (2:22)
Thank you, Dan. It's good to be here.

**Daniel Faggella** (2:23)
Absolutely. Well, we're diving into an exciting part of the world that's changing. You know, everybody's looking at what's happening on their laptops with their open claw, et cetera, and they're getting all hyped up. But I think those of us that have been in the space for a long time are also pretty interested in the fact that the physical world is waking up a lot more than it was even just six months ago in terms of new use cases and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, infrastructure is a place where you guys play a role in that ecosystem at ARM. But when you think about the companies doing warehouse robotics or industrial stuff or the automotive ecosystem where you folks play a lot, and you look at the challenges for AI and infra leaders as data starts to really wake up, more things are being done by machines and not people in the real world. What are the hurdles that today are coming to the fore for those leaders?

**Drew Henry** (3:07)
Yeah, it's an amazing time because, you know, for ARM, we've been for the longest time kind of in the platform of computing that have been used in a number of different areas. And the place where computing has been really applied for a very long time is what I would call the digital portions of the economy. And now we're in this world where technology and computing is being applied to the physical portions of the economy. And this is an area where computing is less concentrated than it is relative to the digital side of things. So the, you know, financial analysis and all that really well penetrated with lots of computing, but warehousing and construction and all that stuff less so. And so this is the big change that's happening right now as people that are running very complicated transportation systems or logistic systems or construction systems or manufacturing systems or whatever that have been on the, working on the world of automation for the longest time are now going, how do I take that one step higher? How do I embed in that this next layer of computing that's come available where you've kind of got the ability to be able to use artificial intelligence techniques and embodying that into these physical machines that people want to use and how do you make that a better value to your company?