This is my conversation with Michael Kagan, the founder of Mellanox and current CTO of NVIDIA We speak about his life, the progression of networking over the span of his career, and how the work that NVIDIA is now doing to build "Planet scale" computing I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did 00:00 Highlights 01:16 Growing Up in Russia and Moving to Israel 03:42 Intel, the PC Revolution, and a Passion for Technology 06:14 Sponsor: Liquid 06:33 Lessons from Intel: Software and Networking 10:10 Founding Mellanox and the Vision for Cloud Computing 14:34 From Supercomputers to the Cloud 17:46 How GPUs Sparked the AI Revolution 20:52 Sponsor: Compute Exchange 21:14 NVLink and the Rise of Rack-Scale Computing 24:57 The Engineering Challenges Behind NVL72 27:39 Designing Hardware for Future AI Workloads 29:43 BlueField DPUs and the AI Factory 32:55 Making AI Agents Safer 35:37 What Mellanox Could Have Done Differently 37:03 NVLink, InfiniBand, and Spectrum-X 39:24 Connecting AI Factories at Planetary Scale 42:42 Keeping Massive AI Systems Running Through Failures