Amin Vahdat

Amin Vahdat received a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, advised by Thomas Anderson; before his PhD he spent about a year and a half as a research associate at the University of Washington.⁠[1][2]

From 2003 to 2013 Vahdat was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he held the SAIC Professorship of Computer Science and Engineering; he has remained an adjunct faculty member there.⁠[2][1]

In 2023 Vahdat was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.⁠[1]

On April 9, 2025, writing as Google’s VP/GM, ML, Systems & Cloud AI, Vahdat announced Ironwood, Google’s seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and the first built specifically for inference: a full pod scales to 9,216 liquid-cooled chips delivering 42.5 exaflops, each chip carries 192 GB of high-bandwidth memory, six times that of the previous-generation Trillium, and performance per watt is roughly double Trillium’s. He wrote: “Ironwood is our most powerful, capable and energy efficient TPU yet.”⁠[3]

On October 29, 2025, the a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel released “Building the Real-World Infrastructure for AI, with Google, CiscoCiscoCisco Systems, Inc. is an American networking technology company, incorporated in 1984, headquartered in San Jose, California, and listed on Nasdaq.Open the full entry & a16z,” hosted by Raghu Raghuram of Andreessen Horowitz, with Vahdat, as Google’s VP and GM of AI and Infrastructure, alongside Jeetu PatelJeetu PatelJeetu Patel is Cisco’s president and chief product officer, responsible for global product strategy. He previously held executive roles at Box, EMC and Doculabs.Open the full entry, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco. The description opens: “AI isn’t just changing software, it’s causing the biggest buildout of physical infrastructure in modern history.”⁠[4]

The conversation covered the scale of the buildout across chips, power grids and data centers, capital expenditure and demand signals, the power bottleneck, scale-out versus mainframe-style architectures, specialized chips and power efficiency, networking for AI, inference architecture and cost reduction, code migration and productivity inside enterprises, and the future of models, agents and intelligent routing layers.⁠[4]

After joining Google, Vahdat served as Technical Lead and Vice President for Google’s Networking organization until 2019; he then became Vice President and General Manager for Google’s compute, storage and network hardware and software infrastructure.⁠[1]

Vahdat is a Fellow and Chief Technologist for AI Infrastructure at Google, where his team covers custom silicon, data centers, networks, and supply chain and operations.⁠[1]

He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry) and has received the SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award, the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award, an NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Distinguished EECS Alumni Award and Duke University’s David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.⁠[1]

Google Research profile: https://research.google/people/amin-vahdat/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

UC San Diego home page: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]