Former Intel Exec Joins Untether AI as President to Drive Commercial Efforts in the Burgeoning AI Acceleration Market

Chris Walker brings deep expertise in semiconductor business leadership and ecosystem development: joining the AI chip company as it scales to bring energy efficient AI inference to the edge and cloud

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Untether AI^®, the leader in energy-centric AI acceleration technology, announced it has appointed Chris Walker, former Corporate Vice President and General Manager at Intel Corporation, as President. After leading the silicon giant’s mobile business unit through multiple years of growth and fostering the company’s client AI work, Walker joins Untether AI to lead its commercial efforts at a time when demand for efficient AI compute is rapidly accelerating.

“Untether AI has been growing at a rapid pace and Chris brings unique experience, growing world-leading chip businesses at the highest level,” said Arun Iyengar, Untether AI CEO. “Chris’ experience in business, engineering, and architecture while focused on driving customer results makes him the ideal leader to take on Untether AI’s rapidly expanding commercial demands.”

This hire comes at a time when Untether AI has its first generation runAI^®-based products reaching its production ramp and the second generation speedAI™ devices sampling soon. At 30 TeraFlops per watt (TFlops/W) and 2 PetaFlops of performance, Untether AI’s speedAI devices set a new standard for energy efficiency and compute density delivering inference compute capabilities with dramatically reduced energy requirements. Untether AI processes AI compute workloads at least 15 times more efficiently than the state-of-the-art chips offered by leading GPU manufacturers.

“I’m thrilled to be part of the company redefining AI chip architecture, the new frontier of computing,” said Chris Walker, Untether AI President. “At a time when demand for AI compute is exploding, Untether AI is building the silicon that will power the next generation of AI workloads. From autonomous vehicles to enabling new enterprise class generative capabilities, demand for AI is an immense opportunity. This is where Untether AI’s ultra-efficient at-memory chip architecture is well-positioned to be a market leader.”

Walker joins Untether to help the company address the growing AI compute demands from the automotive, aerospace, industrial, and financial services sectors. The recent proliferation of large language model use-cases is also increasing demand for efficient AI compute across a range of enterprises. With an architecture that delivers energy-centric high-performance inference, Untether AI is ideally suited to accelerate AI inference applications from the edge to the cloud.

“Chris' ability to drive palpable ambition amongst teams is admired; I am confident he will inspire a mindset of resilience and dedication at Untether AI,” said Arun Chetty, Intel Capital Managing Director. “As the need for AI compute expands, Chris’ vast knowledge in architecture, product management, sales and marketing, and business development will be an invaluable component in aiding Untether AI as they work to unlock the future of AI workloads.”

“Untether AI is at the forefront of creating a new approach to highly efficient AI inference solutions. This is an imperative for scaled AI customer deployments in the data center, cloud, at the edge and embedded solutions,” said Dr. Shaygan Kheradpir, senior advisor to Tracker Capital and the Technology team lead at Cerberus Capital Management. “Chris brings unique and unparalleled leadership experience in delivering innovative solutions and results at the highest levels of scale with partners.”

Walker had previously overseen Intel’s Mobile Client Platforms encompassing SoCs, wired and wireless products. Driving P&L and strategy across engineering, products, customers, and ecosystem partnerships, he grew Intel’s largest business line to over $25 billion. Walker also led from vision through scale the transformation of laptop innovation through Project Athena and the creation of the Intel® Evo™ platform.

About Untether AI

Untether AI® provides energy-centric AI inference acceleration from the edge to the cloud, supporting any type of neural network model. With its at-memory compute architecture, Untether AI has solved the data movement bottleneck that costs energy and performance in traditional CPUs and GPUs, resulting in high-performance, low-latency neural network inference acceleration without sacrificing accuracy. Untether AI embodies its technology in runAI® and speedAI™ devices, tsunAimi™ accelerator cards, and its imAIgine™ Software Development Kit. Founded in Toronto in 2018, Untether AI is funded by CPPIB, GM Ventures, Intel Capital, Radical Ventures, and Tracker Capital. www.untether.ai.

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