Jonathan Ballon

Jonathan Ballon is a serial entrepreneur and board director who has spent more than three decades building the businesses behind the AI era. He is chairman of Axelera AI, a semiconductor company designing energy-efficient chips that run AI everywhere from the factory floor to the data center.

Ballon launched and scaled Intel's AI inference business, building it into a multibillion-dollar global operation, and was the force behind a software platform adopted by millions of developers to run AI outside the data center. Earlier, he helped build GE's software business and led corporate strategy at Cisco.

A serial entrepreneur, he has been an operator or board member at nine startups. He built and sold an early breakout generative AI company and scaled a data center liquid-cooling business. He is a sought-after authority on AI, data center infrastructure and energy-efficient data center technology.

Ballon has keynoted major technology stages including Microsoft Ignite, AWS re:Invent, Mobile World Congress, VentureBeat Transform and the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. He has served on the World Economic Forum's Technology Advisory Board and is guest faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has trained more than 2,500 executives across 73 countries on technology strategy. Audiences know him for explaining, without jargon or hype, where AI is genuinely creating value for business.

Ballon translates the fast-moving world of AI into decisions leaders can act on, drawing on a career spent turning emerging technology into revenue at some of the largest companies in the world and the startups disrupting the status quo.