The Compute 100

Today's guest is Jeff Tatarchuk, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of TensorWave.Jeff is a serial entrepreneur who has spent his career building in the cloud and compute space. Before TensorWave, he co-founded VMAccel, an early FPGA cloud and edge provider, alongside his eventual TensorWave co-founder Darrick Horton. In 2023, Jeff found himself in a convo with someone looking for access to GPUs, to which Jeff posed a simple question – “how about AMD?”. The answer – an immediate “I will take anything!” – resulted in what has become Tensorwave. The company was built on a contrarian bet: that the AI world needed a serious alternative to Nvidia. TensorWave runs exclusively on AMD's hardware and ROCm software stack, and that wager is paying off. The company now operates one of the largest AMD-based AI training clusters in North America and recently raised a $350M Series B at a $1.55B valuation, co-led by Magnetar and AMD Ventures, bringing its total funding to roughly $493M. We're thrilled to have Jeff on the podcast for a conversation about building an AMD-native neocloud, the case for an open AI compute ecosystem, and the path to scaling the world beyond NVIDIA. Jeff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtatarchukThe Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary's compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).Primary: https://www.primary.vc/Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

Today's guest is Jeff Wittich, CPO of Ampere. Jeff started his career at Intel at a device engineer, which launched a 15 year run at the company, eventually leading their cloud business and custom CPU program. In 2019, Jeff joined Ampere, where he currently acts as CPO. Ampere made an early bet on power efficiency being core to the future of AI that paid off in a big way with a $6.5B acquisition by Softbank in 2025. We're thrilled to have Jeff on the podcast for a conversation about the resurgence of the CPU, the rising generation of talent in compute and much more. The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

Today's guest is Lisa Spelman. Lisa is currently the CEO of Cornelis Networks. Lisa's career started at Intel, where she spent almost 19 years, ending her tenure as the GM of Intel's Xeon product, their enteprise CPU line. It was there that Lisa saw the pain around high performance networking on large scale clusters, inspiring the move to the operator side. In 2024, she took the helm at Cornelis Networks, a high-performance networking company spun out of Intel in 2020 built around the OmniPath fabric architecture. Cornelis is purpose-built for the most demanding HPC and AI workloads that require massive, coordinated compute across entire data centers. Cornelis has raised over $140M since its founding in 2020. We're thrilled to have Lisa on the podcast today. The Compute 100 is led by ⁠Brian Schechter⁠ and ⁠Gaby Lorenzi⁠, compute-focused investors at Primary⁠. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).Follow us on ⁠X⁠ and check out our ⁠daily newsletter⁠.This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

Today's guest is Erik Bernhardsson.Erik is the founder and CEO of Modal, NYC-based Series C infrastructure startup, most recently valued at $4.65B, up from their Series B at $1.1B. Modal was founded in 2021, in a pre-ChatGPT world, built to ease developer friction around deploying and running ML models at scale. The early product was inspired by Erik's time at Spotify where he built their music recommender system. Since then, Modal has become a go-to solution for developers who want fast inference across LLMs and agents. Modal is growing rapidly, hitting nearly $300M in revenue, driven by demand for their sandboxes product, which let AI agents run in isolated environments. We're thrilled to have Erik on the podcast. The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter.This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.

Today's guest is Justin Selig.Back in 2018, after hearing about the company from other graduate students, Selig joined Cerebras as an early member of their technical staff. Through 4 years with the company, he built much of their core kernel infra and the Cerebras SDK. He went on to join Eclipse Ventures, one of Cerebras' earliest backers, as an investor. From Eclipse, he joined Efficient Computer, where he works as a director, across product and BD today. Justin was early to the opportunity unfolding today in compute. He's had an incredible seat to watching this market evolve. We hope you enjoy the conversation. The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).Follow us on X and check out our daily newsletter. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing discussed in this podcast constitutes investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, or a recommendation to make any investment. Any views expressed are as of the date of recording, are subject to change, and may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.