Darrick Horton, TensorWave | AMD Advancing AI 2026

In this interview from AMD Advancing AI 2026 in San Francisco, Darrick Horton, co-founder and chief executive officer of TensorWave Inc., joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante to discuss why the company remains an AMD-exclusive neocloud. Horton traces TensorWave's origins back to 2023, when explosive GPU demand and NVIDIA scarcity pushed his team to bet on AMD as the only credible general-purpose alternative. He explains why general-purpose GPUs, rather than transformer-optimized chips, were the right anchor given how far the industry remains from AGI and how many architectural shifts are still ahead. Horton also unpacks TensorWave's alignment with AMD's open-source ethos, contrasting it with what he describes as NVIDIA's monopolistic tendencies, including the Run:ai and Mellanox acquisitions. He draws a comparison to CoreWeave's singular focus on NVIDIA to explain why specialization, not diversification, drives the best customer experience. Horton shares that TensorWave closed a $350 million Series B at a $1.55 billion valuation and is now raising a larger Series C. The company plans to deploy one to two gigawatts of Helios MI455X capacity by 2027, scaling from tens of thousands of GPUs today to hundreds of thousands. From learning lessons out of NVIDIA's early rack-scale struggles to validating Helios ahead of a January production target, Horton lays out why AMD doesn't need to beat NVIDIA outright to become an indispensable second AI platform. Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/ Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/ Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/ 00:00 - Intro 00:06 - AMD's Advancing AI 2026: Key Highlights and Strategic Insights 04:49 - Optimizing AI: Hardware and Model Flexibility 07:20 - Strategic Differentiation Aligned with Core Values 10:22 - Customer Experience Focus 12:47 - AMD's Potential to Outpace NVIDIA 15:01 - Evolving Horizons: Reflections and Future Pathways #theCUBE #AMDAdvancingAI #theCUBEresearch #TensorWave #AMD #NeoCloud