How Diamond Cooling Could Power the Future of AI, with Akash Systems

**Sarah** (0:05)
Welcome to No Priors. Today, I'm chatting with Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell, the founders of Akash Systems, which makes diamond-based cooling technology for computing platforms, from space satellites to AI data centers. Their innovation uses highly conductive diamond to help computers run cooler and faster while using less energy. Felix and Ty, welcome to No Priors.

**Felix Ejeckam** (0:28)
Good to be here.

**Ty Mitchell** (0:29)
Thank you, Sarah.

**Sarah** (0:30)
I think we should start with just a quick introduction as to what Akash is.

**Felix Ejeckam** (0:35)
Sure. Again, very good to be here with you, Sarah. Akash Systems, we re-venture back to company based in the Bay Area that is starting from the ground up at the material science level. We are making using proprietary materials, materials specifically of diamond that we grow in the lab, using it to make electronic systems that are disruptive in the world by an order of magnitude. It's in contrast, often times, when we start companies, even in the hardware space, we tend to start injecting ourselves in the middle of a supply chain at Akash as material scientists, we come in at the periodic table level and we start there to build up chips, boards, systems that ultimately change the lives of our society, whether you're in business or as a consumer.
And we do that in several ways. We change the structure of a basic material. The systems that we've chosen to affect, we started off in the space world, where we make some of the fastest satellite radios ever made by humans. And then we go over, as we are doing now, to AI, where we are able to cause, compute a GPU to go faster than has ever been done before, since the beginning of this new space, or reducing energy consumption in the data center by a significant amount, all because of innovative material science that we've pioneered at the ground floor.

**Sarah** (2:12)
So maybe that's a good segue into how you got started working on this, because you've had this idea for a long time. As you said, you started on space applications earlier. Can you talk a little bit about your background and the original scientific idea and how you thought it would be applied?

**Felix Ejeckam** (2:29)
Sure. So my background is in material science and electrical engineering. I obtained a PhD in electrical engineering with a minor in material science and device physics from Cornell. And in my PhD, I focused on bringing together very dissimilar materials in such a way that 1 plus 1 equals 10 And, you know, for example, silicon, very well known ubiquitous material that's ushered in the current modern era that we have today. But then there are other materials, plastics, other types of semiconductors that don't actually do as well as silicon, but they have their own strengths. And so for my PhD, I looked at ways of trying to bring together, say, the optics world with electronic silicon, and merging them together is such that the overall system is incredibly powerful. That philosophy I've brought to Akash, when I started Akash with Ty in 2017, to try to do the same thing. I've often found personally, and actually I think it's a very good metaphor for humans, how we interact together. When you bring different people that have different strengths, the combination can be incredibly powerful in ways that excel and exceed the simple summation of the parts. And that's exactly what we do at Akash, where we bring artificial diamonds, well known as the most thoroughly conductive material ever grown in nature, or ever to occur in nature, and then silicon or even gallium nitride, and quite frankly any other semiconductor, when brought together, amazing things happen. I'm very happy and excited about doing that in the world of AI. We did that in space, where we have now made and launched the fastest radios ever made by man. And now with AI, we're able to achieve performance levels, whether in energy efficiency levels or compute speeds ever obtained by simply using these artificial materials that we've created in the lab.

**Sarah** (4:45)
Ty, are you the silicon or are you the diamond here?

**Ty Mitchell** (4:50)
I'm actually a little bit of both. I'm the silicon carbide guy. My PhD was on silicon carbide. What that taught me when I went into the business world, working for a company, Cree-Wolfe Speed, is that Cree-Wolfe Speed had developed a very good silicon carbide materials level technology. And applying this technology to any sorts of systems like radar systems or a power electronic system for EVs or light emitting diodes, one of the things you learn is that when you have a materials level advancement, as the person who has that material level advancement, you really have to make the system to convince people that you have the solution. If you just go to someone who is making, let's say, a car, and you say, hey, I've got this great silicon carbide diode, a Schottky diode or a MOSFET, they'll say, all right, great, I'm already using a silicon IGBT. If you meet their price, I'll put you in. And you say, look, if you put my part in, I can increase your range 200 miles. I can increase it 40%. They'll say, OK, yeah, sure.