Highlights From The Massive AI Infra Summit 2026

The AI Infra Summit (formerly AI HW Summit) this year was huge, with over 9,000 registered on-site attendees over three packed days of sessions in Santa Clara stretching over six large stages and a show floor that seemed to span miles. Next year will be even bigger, hosted at the San Jose Convention center where the Kisaco event managers (an amazing crew!) are expecting over 12,000 attendees, which is nearly as large as Nvidia GTC!! In fact, several attendees told me they found this event to be even more enlightening than the Nvidia supershow.

With six tracks I could not follow it all, and I will try to keep this short. But reach out if you have any questions! (Note that Qualcomm and Nvidia are both clients of Cambrian-AI Research.)

Nvidia

Ian Buck, Nvidia VP / General Manager, Hyperscale and HPC, took to the stage on Day 1 to speak the gospel according to Jensen. He presented new benchmarks of the Vera CPU that showed it significantly outperformed AMD Turing CPU on agentic workloads. Vera didn’t just beat Turin by a hair, it blew the AMD part away by some 50-100%. Ian shared data from Clickhouse as well, who commented the that Vera was the fastest CPU they had seen, and had some 30 benchmarks to prove it. I cannot stress enough the importance of CPU performance in agentic AI. While humans take time to read and comprehend the output of an AI query, a CPU agent can consume instantly, and quickly turn that into the next query, increasing the number of turns up to 65 fold per task.

I would note that AMD Exec VP Forrest Norrod showed AMD’s version of the same story on day 3, and AMD claimed better performance than Vera. I sure hope MLPerf or SemiAnalysis can develop some benchmarks for inference processing, just the CPU portion, that everyone can agree on, as this is an increasingly important factor in hardware selection for AI Infrastructure.