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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:04]
B
You are listening to an art media podcast. Yonatan, what's your number this week?
- [00:10]
C
My number is three. Because Nvidia announced yesterday they're tripling down on their Beersheva south of Israel R and D center. That's another decision by Nvidia after we quoted Jensen Huang and the CEO here in Israel and their support of Israeli hostage who was their employee and came back to work after being in the tunnels in Gaza. The company is bidding big on Israel and my number is three. The triple down on Beersheva.
- [00:36]
B
Okay, my number is yours. Minus one. It is two. Mine's a little bit weird. This is the number of antitrust investigations that China has opened into American companies. But the reason I bring it up is that these antitrust investigations are all centered around American companies acquisitions of Israeli startups. So Nvidia is one of them. Their acquisition of Melanox and more recently Qualcomm and its acquisition of a company called Autotox. So I bring this up just as a reminder that there is this escalating broader geopolitical tension and friction that we're seeing between the US and China. Israel is kind of in some weird ways caught in the middle. We'll get into more of that later. So all eyes are on the ceasefire, what's going on in Israel and the broader Middle East. But we've got a lot going on globally that's very, very impactful, shall we say? So who wins?
- [01:28]
C
I like your number. I think it's consequential. I love it because it actually alludes to the fact that there are some pretty unique technologies here in Israel that are so important that they raise a Chinese American antitrust dynamic. But I think Nvidia tripling down on Beersheva, which is, you know, the main city in the south of Israel, the sort of core city for the envelope of Gaza as well. This is very significant. It's yet another sign coming in from Jensen Huang, and I think it's very consequential. So I'm siding with mine.
- [01:57]
B
I'll give it to you. Not only because three is bigger than two, but also because I do agree it's consequential. It is 11:30am in Palo Alto.
- [02:14]
C
It is 8:30 here in Israel PM.
- [02:17]
B
So I want to, before we dive into a few different items, I do want to just mention that unfortunately we were not able to record last week. And the reason is we have a very good reason. It all goes back to aws. Now, I know that this outage impacted governments and corporations multi billion dollar global conglomerates and the like. But really the biggest impact was on us. On what's your number?
- [02:43]
C
I agree, I agree. There is a poet in Israel who said my world is as narrow as an ant's view. You know, it's all about us.
- [02:52]
B
It totally is. By the way, the best story I heard about kind of a impact of this outage was, you know, this company, the Smart mattress company. I mean there are several but this one's called Sleep 8. So apparently because those are also reliant on Amazon's AW, US people had their mattresses stuck in like random positions or they overheated because they weren't connected to the cloud. So you know, all sorts of unintended consequences.
- [03:16]
C
There is a cautionary tale in, in what happened with aws. I mean clearly we're the kind of least significant casualty of this. But you know, at the end of the day the reliance on Amazon Web Services and you know, and other cloud providers through banks and infrastructure, trains, airplanes, it is a cautionary tale, you know, going forward as the dependency just becomes bigger and bigger.
- [03:40]
B
Absolutely. Diversify your cloud provider. If you haven't done so yet, do it today. Including Riverside I guess and us. Let's move on to just kind of ceasefire. I don't know if we can call it post war economic updates quite yet but you know, we chatted through this over the last few days. Yonatan, what are you looking at as this still kind of fragile ceasefire is in effect?
- [04:06]
C
Look, I think I'm very optimistic. There are, you know, a lot of signs of normaly back in the Israeli economy. The beat is up. Just you know, a couple of, you know, things that maybe may sound a bit inconsequential but they are very important for the national psyche. Apoll and Maccabi Tel Aviv Apoll Jerusalem have been allowed in basketball. To go back to hosting in Israel again may sound inconsequential but this is kind of like really big in terms of like how being back to normal is a key thing for the Israeli economy. The Nvidia decisions, we're back to normal. Also on the news cycle, you know, the kind of things that you know, you go back, you open the news in traffic and you're listening to non war related economic stories. The focus is back on what matters. We heard Naftali Bennett today presenting a plan for a radical shift in the education system. It's good to hear the politicians going back to the, you know, civilian agenda. Right. What really matters for day to day Israelis and really the education system here is in need of an overhaul that may require a long term strike. And it's good to see some of the politicians raising the bar. Overall, that's a good sense of normalcy coming forward. The fog of war is still not lifted completely. There are concerns about the demilitarization with Hezbollah. That's kind of starting to wobble. There are concerns about whether or not Hamas is going the right direction. I saw Khalil Al Khir being interviewed in Arabic in Al Jazeera. And I have to tell you, it's like we're back to October 6th on the other side, right? The guy's talking about how it was the right thing to do. And like, that's Al Jazeera. Qatar on the day the Emir was meeting President Trump on his way to his East Asia trip. So, you know, on the strategic level, a lot of ambivalence. But on, on the kind of person to person on the ground, Tel Aviv is packed. The other day on Saturday night, I had to go meet a friend and I literally couldn't walk the streets like in some areas of Tel Aviv because it was so packed. I was in Jerusalem last night for a town hall for Elenu. Really incredible to see. There was the super classico Real Madrid, Barcelona. It was like all the bars are full. Arabs, Jews, Christians. I think there's a sense of normalcy on the ground and I hope it sticks.
- [06:20]
B
Well, hopefully people can get back to complaining about traffic and other good things. You know, I do think one question for me, and this is something we've talked about on the podcast, is what happens next? You know, you mentioned the Arab media. What happens next? Also kind of in the cultural conversation, not only media, social media, but on college campuses, on the streets, there is a ceasefire in place. Now. At the same time, it doesn't look like people who have been calling for a ceasefire are necessarily celebrating the fact that there is one. And that sets says a lot. And I remember when we had Professor Aneta Barakohen on, she mentioned that BDS activity actually spiked when there were previous ceasefires. So I think that's a really good question for us to be asking and to stay really vigilant on the kind of what happens next within the global conversation as well.
- [07:10]
C
Yeah, look, there's a concern. There was that there were a couple of delegations of Jewish communities here in Israel over the last couple of weeks. I had the privilege of talking to a few of them. There is a concern specifically around Mandani, the New York elections, what that does to philanthropy that comes from New York into Israel. What that does to the Jewish community, I think that's a concern and I think we're going to have to deal with the aftermath of the war, not just here in Israel. It's the global Jewish peoplehood dynamic. It needs to be redefined. I think there's going to be, I know of some initiatives that add up to north of a billion dollars altogether if they all, you know, materialize in the next year of philanthropy and investment in Israeli academia. And I hope that facilitates an entire new conversation dialogue between Israel and Jewish and ex Israeli professors worldwide to facilitate sort of, you know, back to basics dynamics on basic science and so on. And I think it also relates to our guests on the show today, these dynamics of where Israel is so strong scientifically, it's time to double down on those. And really my kind of inclination or battle cries not to lean back. There's a sense of the national therapy, government dynamics and let's relax and let's do a repo. Ben Gurion, 1949, after the Armistice Committee and the agreements were signed and a percent of the Jewish population died in the war, that's the equivalent of 100,000 people dying right now. He did not go back to the public and say, hey, we're leaning back. We now have two states, we have broader mandate than we had in the partition plan. Relax and let's do a therapy. No, he said, here are 11 national projects. We're going full on and we're going to build a state. We need to adopt that Ben Gurion agenda right now. Not to lean back. There's a whole Turkish element going on. There's a whole reconstruction of the economy. And to me, double down, triple down, quadruple down on what I call the marks, right? Materials science, AI, robotics, quantum space and synthetic biology. We're good at that. But the world is moving fast and we were not moving as fast in the last two years.
- [09:19]
B
Well, and to quote another great late man, Andy Grove, who wrote Only the Paranoid Survive. So I think that's a good segue from former intel CEO. This is like the semiconductor episode here that we're putting together. So today we are speaking with Elad Raz, who is the founder and CEO of Next Silicon. It's a startup that has pioneered a new chip infrastructure for use in high performance computing. And it's got really big implications when it comes to AI. So we'll talk to a lot about where this technology is going and the role that Israeli innovation like his can play in this new area where compute power really truly is the new oil and is so closely intertwined with geopolitics, both alliances and hostilities that we're seeing out there.
- [10:07]
C
Look, I think you know, Israel is very proud of its iron dome, but in many ways when you look to Taiwan, it has a silicon dome. It has demonstrated to the world that its control and prowess in the silicone domain in semiconductor has won a geopolitical power and wielded its capacity to retain its freedom. The fact that Israel has aspirations in the silicon space and our silicon posture, as we'll hear from Elad, is so powerful. Definitely compared to the fact we're at 10 million people. There are about five countries where EL AD's can rise and shine. People can come out with an idea for a new, you know, chip with the ecosystem around it to build a company. People who know how to do it. The ex intel folks here in Israel, the Mellanox folks, the Habana Lab folks who are here and have the know how in a recurring entrepreneurs. Right. The Nvidia, we just discussed it in the numbers of the day. The Nvidia presence that's so robust, the ability to raise capital to the tune that next silicone has and to be so audacious in building silicon, you know, innovation. There are about four or five countries. It's in the us, it's in Taiwan, it's in South Korea, which is mainly Samsung. So not a lot of entrepreneurship, but more kind of a, you know, robust kind of big conglomerate. It's the Netherlands with ASML and it's Israel. And so a lot. And you know, to our listeners, he's an amazing guy. Listen to sort of his vision, but also always keep it in the back of your mind. This tiny country in the Middle east has entrepreneurs of this caliber. It has a very strong silicon posture. And when we're going for AI, that's a very rare capacity to have as an ecosystem.
- [11:48]
B
Yeah. And I think it's also worth noting, especially as we segue to the Windex update, that despite the fact that yes, Israel has had this talent in house, most of it has not gone towards forming companies, in particular large companies. Right. But this is also unique, I think in that regard, where we're seeing more and more of these really, you know, daring entrepreneurs actually try to create their own versus like join an intel, which has always had a presence in Israel for a long time.
- [12:16]
C
In many ways a lot is. And we'll hear it from him. His theory about where semiconductors are going is very similar to, you know, if you heard JENSEN Huang in 2009 or 202011 saying look, intel is huge, but the GPU, what we're making with more manufacturing is going to eat the CPUs lunch. And in many ways Elad has a similar kind of concept. And again the audacity in a good way. Right. And the fact that when you are so audacious as an entrepreneur, you can raise capital and have the right human capital. Also Israel speaks very highly of the ecosystem.
- [12:48]
B
All right, well let's move on to the Windex before we get to the interview with Elad. This is our what's your number index that tracks the performance of publicly traded Israeli based or founded companies. Let's get to it. On to the Windex. Yonatan, how are things looking?
- [13:06]
C
So to be honest with our listeners, last week the Windex when we recorded was in the red because we followed a specific week. It was the first one after eight consecutive weeks of a green Windex that was also overperforming both NASDAQ and SAP. We are now at a point where we are looking at a two week period. So Windex is back in the green more or less equivalent to the S and P and Nasdaq. The Windex is performing at 2.26% percent in the green. Two very interesting companies performing this week, one in the green, one in the red. The green is a company called Protalix, an old public company out of Israel. Super interesting one going up by 25% in a two week period. This is a company that used to be worth more or less, you know, 50x than it is worth right now. A biotech company that makes proteins for human drugs in a way. Right. So enzymes and others. It is a pioneer in that in the world based on carrots. So they grow, grow their proteins and their drug candidates. It's amazing. I was there in their facility up north like I think 15 years ago. It's like a sci fi movie. Like these huge canisters that are orange in which they grow the proteins. And the company is up 25% because one of their drug candidates won an FDA clearance a couple of months ago and has been doing really well. And so Wall street is paying very close attention to that. Again, a bit of a sci fi. And I'm very happy to see Protalix kind of back on the rise.
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B
I want to write about this just to have fun with the headlines. To be honest. The carrots are just, it's mind boggling and I love that it's actually orange canisters, but this is a space I don't know a whole lot about. For full disclosure, this is more your world than mine, I think. But those stocks do seem to be pretty volatile. So I don't know how much we should be reading into this increase. Right.
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C
No, I agree. I mean, again, considering the fact that the company was worth 50x on the market cap and their promise ultimately was not delivered.
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B
Okay, what's in the orange? Just kidding. Red. We should have a new, new category just for orange companies. All right, what's in the red?
- [15:11]
C
Il Maquias. Remember the cosmetics? DTC Israeli, a new joiner of the Windex this year, suffered a 10% decline in the last two weeks for two main reasons. One, a reduction in analyst recommendations. And the second is what seems to be a persistent lawsuit that's referred to by Wall street as AI washing. A class action lawsuit for security fraud led by an investor, individual shareholder called Brian Hore H O A R E or hori. The notion is that they've overstated the founders of Oddity. The use of AI in their technology for recommending which makeup to use. It's the first of its kind that I saw that is impacting a share price. I know for a fact in the private market, so many companies overstating their AI prowess. But it's an interesting one to watch. I'm a big believer in auditing. I think they're going to recover.
- [16:07]
B
Yeah. I had to look up this AI washing concept which I wasn't familiar with. But this is a huge warning sign, I think, to companies that are pushing forward with this, whether intentionally or not, completely AI washing. I bet a lot of companies are doing it. So very interesting to see this.
- [16:24]
C
And you know, there's one company that I looked up to for a very long period of time. They had an amazing ipo. That's Ginkgo Bioscience Ticker DNA. Not an Israeli company now trading for less than a billion. And that was a big AI promise. We'll do this and we'll that and synthetic biology. But some folks in and around the business already knew back then that's a promise they're not going to be able to deliver. And it is a thing where Wall street loses trust. It is very, very hard to recover. Ginkgo Biossance is a great example for that. And in that sense, I'm a big believer in the open market.
- [16:57]
B
Yeah. And I, and I think, you know, it's becoming very, very clear these days that this new AI world that we're in is going to completely reconfigure who are the Winners. Who are the losers? You know, I didn't totally expect that there'd be some losers because they're AI washing, not because they don't have their AI strategy right. Or they're becoming obsolete today, you know. Anyways, lots more to say there. But let's move on to today's long play. Today we are interviewing Elad Raz, founder and CEO of NYX Silicon. Elad, welcome to what's yous Number?
- [17:33]
A
Thank you for having me. Michal and Yonatan, of course.
- [17:36]
B
We've been looking forward to this. So one of the things I did in preparation for this interview and in order to get a better understanding first of all of your technology and what you're actually doing. As I asked ChatGPT to explain what Next Silicone does as if it's talking to a seven year old. Because I have a seven year old, so why not? And here is what it served up. Imagine you have 1,000 toy cars that all need to go through a maze. A regular computer chip gives each car one path and they all wait their turn. But Next Silicon's chip is like a magical maze that changes its shape while the cars are driving. So the toy cars can go through faster and fewer get stuck. Does that accurately represent what you guys are doing?
- [18:24]
A
I like it, I love it. And yes, I mean in another way I'm saying about what Next Silicon is doing. And you know, we are doing those computing chip that accelerate supercomputing, high performance computing, AI, machine learning. But think about the Pareto principle, the 8020 rule, the thing that we are doing on our daily life. Now let's allocate the majority of the time, the 80% to what matters. That's the 8020 rule. Now over the past eight years, what humanity did is build computing chip processor code that runs instruction like we all know what instruction is doing. It's a command that you give to the computer and the computer executed and it's executed one after the other. That's the processor code. That's what intel invented in 1974 with the 4004 moving forward to GPUs, we are still relying on those processor code to an instruction. What Next Silicon come is with a concept saying, well, in those massively parallel application, in this workload that accelerates science code or AI, machine learning, neural network, there is a small percentage of the code that runs the majority of the time. So instead of us trying to accelerate every instruction one after the other, let's focus on what matters. Let's focus on these small kernels that run the majority of the time and accelerate them.
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B
And this is what you're describing here is the Maverick chip, correct?
- [19:52]
A
Correct. That's the Maverick chip.
- [19:54]
C
Ellad. You know, Jensen Huang, in 2009, when Nvidia was tiny and intel was huge, was asked by Charlie Rose, what's the future of Nvidia compared to the size and strength of Intel? And his answer was kind of similar to what you just said. They said, you know, the CPU was invented to address two key functions of the PC, which is basically a word processor and a big calculating machine. That's Excel and Word were the killer apps from Microsoft. It became huge and the CPU supported these two. The gpu, which is what we invented, is going to support the thinking machines that are not going to do word processing and are not going to do calculation. So can you give us maybe a layer below, if you will, the philosophical thought process right before we talk circuits and design and so on. How do you see computation and kind of the use of computers over the next kind of decade plus and align for that as opposed to what we're doing right now with computers?
- [20:52]
A
Let's start with beginning what the chatgpt moment. I mean we all understood that our life is going to change and we are seeing that integrate more and more on our daily life. I mean right now, as Michal said, the way that I'm using those large language model is by chatting, I'm sending a query and getting a result back. And we are still using just a tiny portion of what we can squeeze out of this technology. Now. It's obviously that we need way more compute. Imagine that you will have those large language model running every second of your life, just analyzing everything. This is the agent mode that we are all talking about how much compute the world is going to to need. And the second layer is obviously us trying to optimize on power consumption and the amount of compute. Back in February and March we seen the deep SEQ moment that causes a lot of the tech sell off that hey, we find a model that is way more efficient. Oh my God, we never need a compute. I mean this is far from being truth. And just think about it, we have another 1000x of improvement to go. And what do I mean by that? Your human brain is working on 20 watt of operation. The same operation that LLM consumed 20,000 watts. And we are going to see a lot of deep SEQ moment. You will find new neural network, new models, new algorithm. The other level that is more related to what next silicon bring is that when I started the company eight years ago. I did it because I thought about new technology that was never existed. Okay. I can data flow a software that reconfigures the chip. I mean highly technical. And this is what I wanted to do. Even without knowing where it's going to lead me and to do, even without knowing what we are doing here at Next Silicon is doing a new technology that is not a better version. We are not developing a better GPU or a better cpu. It's like something completely else. This is why I'm getting so much excited, because those innovation has a chance to lead the market.
- [22:57]
B
So I know Jonathan wants to talk chip design and circuits and go like inside. I'm going to like zoom way out. Sorry Yonatan, but you know, Israel is obviously known for certain things when it comes to tech and cyber and software. But what are the really the strengths and weaknesses for Israeli companies today in the space that you are in? Because this is not an easy company to start. It's. You've been at it for eight years. It takes a lot of patience, takes a lot of capital, give us kind of like more ecosystem level. Where do you think things stand for companies like yours?
- [23:29]
A
I think that Israel is blessed by innovator that thinks differently. And I think that the inception of semiconductor chip design, compute design was the beginning of the Israel nation. In 1953, the Weizmann Institute had a discussion whether Israel should build the first computers. And you know, it was very costly back then. It wasn't a transistor, it was those vacuum tube, the big machine. I mean not long time before that the ENIAC was the first computer that is being built. And there was a discussion, hey, should we allocate 20% of Weizmann Institute to build such a machine here in Israel? And it came obviously to Ezra Weizmann that say, yes, we are going to bet that because we don't know how building a new technology can lead the nation forward. And the build was carried out in 1954 and 1955. It was a big undertaking, lots of money, huge success by the way, it was kept running 24 hours for a decade where like intelligence forces using it at night, researchers doing daytime, and they even bought someone to operate the machine in Shabbat. Now the other fun part of that story that no one knows, and this is also the Israeli mentality about, you know, trust me, it's going to be okay, is when they switch on the machine. So there was a big celebration. Lots of VIPs came into the gallery in Weizmann Institute and they turn on the machine for the first time and guess what happened? Fire broke. And you know, VIPs were all running around and you know they shut it down. Then I asked one of the builder, you know, you haven't tested it before, say no, no, we were sure it's going to be okay. Now the reason why Yonatan smile because this is like the image and mentalities of Israeli founder. You know, great innovation. But I think that the industry mature. I think that in the years to come you had multinationals like Motorola that came to Israel shortly after IBM, Texas Instrument, obviously Intel with DO Fuhrmann that started dram the memory chip foundries and then move forward into the actual design with Daddy Perlmuter bringing to the CPU core the actual design, not just the manufacturing in Israel. And obviously Mellanox that got acquired with Nvidia. And so this inception moment and multinationals that discover Israel changed the industry, made Israel high tech what it is today. We are now seeing way bigger companies and if back then the amount of capex needed to fabricate the chip was relatively tiny, now we are talking about huge numbers. You know, intel is doing everything here. Nvidia is one of the biggest employers that just keep getting more talent. And Apple that acquire a small company here and made it a big design center for the iPhone chip. The Apple silicon was developed here. They bought a company called Anubit. So yeah, lots of exciting things happened here.
- [26:43]
B
Go back for a second. You actually spent time at Mellanox, right? Did that kind of help shape sort of this aha moment that you had for this company or what? What was it that did?
- [26:53]
A
Absolutely. I mean at heart I'm a software engineer. This is what I've done. I started the company and later on Melanox acquired that company. And over there I got exposed into supercomputing, high performance networking. The way that those machines works. The question that I ask myself, you know, we keep doing the same thing and as kind of a hacker mentality, you know that in Israel you have so many cyber companies. The reason why it is because this is what we needed for us to survive. So there is a big education about cybersecurity even before the military and doing the military. So it's easy to do that. And then I thought to myself, well, I'm seeing all those incredible technologies. Can we make it better? I don't know, but it looks fun. And that's the start of next silicon.
- [27:38]
C
Is it fair to say lad? You know, we are looking globally at very few countries that have any significant, you know, silicon posture. It's Taiwan, it's Korea, it's the U.S. you know, how do you feel about Israel's posture when it comes to the future of silicon, the future of semiconductors? Are we at a point where we can also draw and attract global talent here? That's non Jewish, that's non Israeli. Like what's your thought process of continuing to build next silicon? Is Israel where it should be? Is it on the right track?
- [28:12]
A
So absolutely there is amazing talent here. There is design and there is silicon fabrication manufacturing. That's the TSMC and Samsung and Intel. So in terms of design we have a class companies here. Annapurna Labs was a small startup started by Vikdor and Billik and Napha got acquired by AWS and they're literally running the entire AWS custom silicon here from Israel.
- [28:39]
B
AWS is a sore subject for us right now by the way, but that's okay.
- [28:44]
A
Yeah. And you know, Apple silicon and intel developed their Pentium chip here. So in terms of design we have world class leading the entire interconnect the NVLink, the thing that made Nvidia AI factory rather than that just a chip. You know, if you hear Jensen is saying here is a chip, but we are building those big AI factories, it's all developed here from scratch over the past 20, 30 years even that's the Mellanox IP. And by the way, there are good people here like Sandalcoin that try to do a model to bring talent from the US to work here in like Bell's lab kind of model. And in terms of silicon manufacturing, we have the knowledge here in Israel because Intel started the EUV machine fabs here in Israel. Obviously it's not a full technology transfer because you have the factories here. Personally I don't believe that investing $30 billion for Leading Edge fab, it's something that makes sense for Israel because it's huge investment, lot of trade secrets. But in terms of design, we are world class innovators.
- [29:47]
B
I want to go back to what you said earlier about Deep Seek and you know, there's this whole conversation now around this ever growing need for more and more energy in order to fuel the growing AI needs and then at the same time innovation like what you're doing, right? And reportedly what we're hearing out of China, more and more advances, who knows what's really going on. But reports of more advances on the energy efficiency side, where do you kind of fall in that conversation? Are both equally important. What's ultimately Going to lead the way forward to whomever succeeds in this race.
- [30:27]
A
Performance and power consumption are tightly coupled concept. Given a chip that run twice as fast and consume twice the power consumption is diminishing return because you can just buy two chips together. And one of the things that we are seeing with GPUs, especially the leaded one, is that you know at first glance you are seeing twice the performance from generation to generation, but also power consumption go twice Next Silicon Innovation aims to get 4x performance with half of the power consumption still. You remember we have like 1000x gap that will be used in like algorithmic breakfast. But every vendor is doing its own part to gain more power efficiency. I mean if you're talking about cooling, we have amazing companies here that working on cooling and infrastructure and racks level scaling and power consumption. So like we have the entire stack. Zootaco is a company in the south doing an innovative solution where you can take a full data center and call it with fraction of the power need. Also insane.
- [31:37]
C
Just these last two minutes from Ella. Just to give again context to our listeners. There are very few parts of the world that within I would say radius of 120km have all that stack in place combined with capital, combined with the entrepreneurial, you know, capacities and in real terms super competitive globally.
- [32:00]
B
Not to play devil's advocate here, but I am wondering in terms of just down the road positioning for Israel, where this all goes, what's the plan here? And it's not just an exit plan question, it's really more about the placement and the bigger picture because so much of this now touches on geopolitics and on this bigger arms race. Right. As we spoke about primarily when it comes to AI and energy and energy efficiency. So how do you think Israel is positioned? How can it be better position itself to play a role, you know, a successful role in this race.
- [32:37]
A
Yeah. As you laid it out so clearly, Compute is, is a nation need, it's a nation mission. It's not just cyber that it's about the compute, it's about the algorithm, it's about the data, it's about securing the future. A nation that, that will lead that market is going to win big time. The fact that we have here the talent that thinks differently, that innovate and every company I mentioned, it's not because it's a name drop, it's because someone who changed the Israeli state and the global compute market, you know, we have here such a drive to win, we have limited resources, we have our own problems in the, in the neighborhood. That's what makes us special because we think very differently. So we can innovate, we can work in limited resources. That's great. That's an opportunity. And it's not just an exit strategy. Not, I mean, you've seen huge companies mobili getting into ipo, big acquisition. That's what we are building here.
- [33:37]
B
Last question for you, Elad. You etched the word Bereshit in the beginning on the first version of the Maverick chip, which is your flagship, your main product. I want you to just tell the story of how and what you have chosen to engrave on the Maverick.
- [33:55]
A
You know, I asked my rabbi in the shul when we did the Maverick one, what should we wrote? And he said, you know, use the word Bereshit. You know, in the beginning, the first word of the Bible and the scriptures say that this word encapsulate everything. Everything that was everything that will be amazing. So we put the word Bereshit and for a long time I did like a thought experiment. It seems like I'm the only one that carries in the company what I'm going to engrave in the second generation. And I couldn't find anything better than the World Berry Sheet. So I said, okay, let's keep the world berry sheet. October 7th came moments before the tape out. Tape out is when we take the design into TSMC and we start making the mask for production. The day after I send an email and I said, well, those horrible things happened to us and the only thing that I want to put in the chip is I'm Israel Shai, like the Israeli state lives. This is a message for resilience. This is a message that encapsulates everything. It took us like a few weeks to get the approval with me threatening that I'm not going to tap out. But you know, it was just a policy and me being over emotional because they couldn't say no. And here we are. And I'm so much proud that we etched that on the chip. It just reflects everything that Next Silicon stands for and Israel stands for.
- [35:17]
C
This is incredible to think about all the BDS folks who will be calling for BDS of Israel with their chip in their computer or the cloud somewhere that they're leveraging has Amisrael Chai on the chip. I love it and thank you for the audacity. Thank you for a lot of respect to you, to the team, to the investors who are doubling down on this and taking the grit that this Silicon journey requires.
- [35:42]
B
Yeah, I love that you said earlier that this sounded like Something fun to do. So you are a very special person for sure. Thank you so much, Elad.
- [35:51]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [35:57]
B
Well, that was a lot of information. I thought Elad was fascinating. The last story he shared was also. I, you know, didn't expect a conversation on semiconductors to be so moving, but it definitely was.
- [36:10]
C
We tell the story of AI globally and we don't realize how central Israel is to the backbone of AI, to the backbone of semiconductors. His story about the Weizmann Institute in the early days and how Israel was a pioneer in computation in the original machines in the early 50s. That was a time when there was austerity in Israel. It was the time where there were food stamps in Israel and the country decided to invest thousands of dollars in creating one of the world's first computers where people were rationing food.
- [36:41]
B
Yeah, it's. I think that the way you, you frame it makes it all the more clear just what a bold bet it was. So great interview. We do need to close and as usual, we're gonna end with our words of the week. We start with the numbers, we're gonna end with the words. I am not sticking with the semiconductor theme of this entire episode. I wanted to mix it up a little bit and do something completely different. And so for those in New York and those who are following along just because you're fans, last week the Israeli singer, very popular singer Omer Adam played a sold out show in New York's Madison Square Garden. 20,000 people showed up. You know, for those of us again in, in the us, whether you're in or out of New York, it is significant, I think for Israelis, it's significant, obviously. And this is what he wrote to fans ahead of the show. Madison Square Garden, we are on our way. Please fasten your seatbelts. I hope you're ready. At last we can celebrate. Our brothers and sisters are home. Am Israel Chai actually is a really nice thread to the interview with Elad Am Israel Khay. It's amazing, I have to say it, for whatever reasons, for a number of reasons, it's the upcoming, it's the elections in New York, the mayoral elections that we're all following, the return of the hostages. It's the ceasefire. You know, this is a really, I thought a really special moment. And yes, there's an economic angle to it too, because they sold out Madison Square Garden. So there's that.
- [38:16]
C
We started this at the, at the beginning of the episode. The feeling on the street in Israel. You know, Omar Adam is kind of like a barometer, right? Or you can take the temperature of the nation through Omar Adam is like so mainstream and touches so many Israeli households. It's a great reflection of what we're experiencing in Israel. It's this sort of like heavy weight lifted and really now is the time to make the tough decisions and not to lean back. There's a big pressure feeling that we just want to relax and rest and it's the intuitive thing to do. I think that for the sake of Israel's future, its hundredth year of Jewish sovereignty here in the state of Israel over the next 20 plus years, this is exactly the time to reinvent. This is exactly the time to lean in and not lean back. We can't afford any other, you know, strategy at this point in time.
- [39:04]
B
All right, that is it for today's show. Thank you for tuning in to Ark Media's what's your number? We hope you found it interesting and if you did, please be sure to, like, subscribe. Rate review. You know the drill. Most importantly, please share it with others who you think will find it interesting. And if you want to make suggestions, we are always happy to hear from you. Share your feedback. Good, bad, ugly, maybe just good. But we'll take the rest. Please reach out to us at what's Your number? @arc media.org.
- [39:40]
C
What'S your numbers? Produced by Adam James, Lavina Redi. Sound and video editing is by Martin Huergo. Our theme music is by Midnight Generation. I'm Yonatandiri.
- [39:50]
B
And I'm Michal Avram. We'll see you back here next week.
- [39:53]
C
AWS per meeting. We'll see you back here next week. Bye.
- [39:58]
A
Bye.
- [40:02]
B
This podcast offers general business and economic information and is not a comprehensive summary for investment decisions. It does not recommend or solicit any investment strategy or security.