Geoff Tate

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Geoff Tate is a technology strategy advisor. He was the founding CEO of Flex Logix (now part of Analog Devices). Before that, he was the founding CEO of Rambus, and prior to that he was senior vice president of AMD's processor group. He received his BSc in computer science from the University of Alberta, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Author's Latest Posts

Lasers Are The Heartbeat Of The Optical AI Data Center
By Geoff Tate - 13 May, 2026 - Comments: 0

Last month we discussed how all interconnects will be optical in the data center in five years, but that's only part of the story. Every optical interconnect needs a laser. The laser provides the carrier, which is modulated and manipulated by the transmitter optical engine through fibers and connectors to the receiver optical engine. Each fiber, connector, and photonics device that the laser... » read more

All AI Data Center Interconnects Will Be Optical Within 5 Years
By Geoff Tate - 06 Apr, 2026 - Comments: 0

I spent several days at OFC (Optical Fiber Communications Conference) 2026 in LA. The crowds were huge and the enthusiasm intense. Long-time attendees noted the shift from telecom to data center AI in just a few years. Nvidia GTC 2026 took place simultaneously in San Jose. OFC and GTC are entangled because data center AI needs optical interconnect to keep compute fed. Optical interconnect... » read more

Data Centers In Space?
By Geoff Tate - 09 Mar, 2026 - Comments: 0

The merger of xAI and SpaceX, the efforts by some startups, and research by Google have raised the question of when there will be data centers in space. The big advantage of space is the plentiful availability of solar energy, in a sun-synchronous orbit. Fig. 1: A possible orbital data center of the future. Source: Wikipedia, Creative Commons. SpaceX’s impressive Starlink uses s... » read more

Silicon Photonics In The Data Center: What A CMOS Exec Needs To Know
By Geoff Tate - 09 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

Silicon Photonics is changing the data center, with the biggest changes still ahead. Figure 1: Google Jupiter Network for multi-thousand Ironwood TPU clusters. Source: Google Refresher for new readers: Data centers contain hundreds or thousands of racks. For example, the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 AI compute/switch rack is about 24 inches wide, about 88 inches high and 42 inches deep. I... » read more

Data Centers Need High Reliability Semiconductors
By Geoff Tate - 12 Jan, 2026 - Comments: 0

“In the world of designing cars, planes, AI factories … you’ve got to be perfect," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on CNBC last month. "And the reason for this is because there is so much at stake.” Cars and planes need to be extremely reliable because people die if they aren’t. In AI data centers, no one dies when systems fail, but the economic impact is gigantic because Amazon, Goog... » read more

Chip Innovation Will Bridge The Gap For USA Data Center Power
By Geoff Tate - 08 Dec, 2025 - Comments: 0

Heading to meetings in Silicon Valley, I often drive through Santa Clara, passing boxy buildings with few windows. They are data centers for local customers willing to pay for low latency. Data centers cluster in Santa Clara because that city's power has been the cheapest in Silicon Valley. The San Jose Mercury News recently reported that two data centers in Santa Clara are empty, waiting for a... » read more

China GenAI: Who Will Fill The Vacuum?
By Geoff Tate - 10 Nov, 2025 - Comments: 1

China and the U.S.A are locked in a titanic battle over tariffs. The U.S. makes the world’s best AI Accelerators: Nvidia, AMD, Google, AWS …among others. But the U.S. worries China could deploy these for military purposes, so it imposed strict export controls that resulted in China getting the second-best AI accelerators. These export controls have been further tightened as part of tarif... » read more

AI Bubble Or Boom?
By Geoff Tate - 20 Oct, 2025 - Comments: 1

Are we in an AI bubble? Parallels are being drawn to the dot.com boom/bust of 1999-2000. In the dot.com bust, many high-tech companies valuations soared up 10X, then deflated. The peak P/E ratio for the Nasdaq Composite was 200! Remember Webvan? It went public November 1999 with an $8 billion valuation, then filed for bankruptcy 19 months later. It was much speculation without profits or gro... » read more

What Do LLMs Want from Hardware
By Geoff Tate - 08 Sep, 2025 - Comments: 0

Figure 1: Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini vice president, presented this in his Hot Chips 2025 talk. Noam Shazeer is Google’s vice president of engineering for Gemini, their LLM competitor to ChatGPT. He talked recently at Hot Chips: “Predictions for the Next Phase of AI." He has worked on LLMs for a decade since inventing the transformer model in 2017. As his slide says, LLMs can take adv... » read more

Physical AI Chip Sales Won’t Rival GenAI Anytime Soon
By Geoff Tate - 11 Aug, 2025 - Comments: 0

Fig. 1: When can we send our humanoid to pick up some milk at the store? Source: ChatGPT image There has been a lot of talk about physical AI, much of it very optimistic. Physical AI is happening, but more slowly than many expect. It will not rival GenAI soon. We’ll analyze humanoids, fully autonomous vehicles, then all application-specific robots (ASRs), ending with a rough estimate ... » read more

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