Inside Yotta’s Innovate Arena: Standout Breakthroughs for AI
At Yotta 2025, I had the privilege of judging Innovate Arena sessions—a Shark Tank-style innovation contest in which innovators pitched their latest concepts reimagining how we power, cool, and sustain the digital world.
From the stage, the mix of rigor and audacity was unmistakable. The ideas weren’t incremental; they aimed at what’s next—and they stuck with me.
Innovate Arena spotlighted new approaches to some of the most pressing challenges facing our industry, from infrastructure efficiency to breakthrough applications. My role as judge gave me a front-row seat to entrepreneurs and visionaries who are imagining new tech frontiers.
Innovation From All Angles
What struck me most throughout the sessions was the diversity of ideas. Some solutions were deeply technical, drilling into hardware optimization and software integration. Others were transformative in their vision—rethinking the very inputs we use to generate and deliver power. The range itself underscored that innovation isn’t one-size-fits-all. The answers to today’s challenges will come from unexpected directions, and we need to create more venues like this to give them visibility and foster open collaboration.
Judging these sessions was a blast. I got to kick the tires on bold ideas, press on the business logic, and challenge assumptions. The energy from startups and smaller teams was palpable—the spark that keeps this industry moving.
Highlights from Innovation Arena
Several presentations stood out for the way they attacked real bottlenecks across the AI landscape—everything from how we move electrons to how we pull permits. We saw farm-level methane captured and upgraded into RNG to decarbonize energy inputs, a tightly integrated power chain to accelerate delivery inside the data center, and aluminum-air systems offering cleaner, on-demand backup power. Add in smarter fiber deployments at giga-scale, a reimagined critical-power supply chain, AI that compresses permitting from months to hours, and modular/immersion builds that deploy fast with ultra-low PUEs—and you get a snapshot of innovation that’s practical, scalable, and ready for the AI era.
Amp Americas – Turning Manure into Megawatts: Capturing methane from dairy operations and upgrading it into pipeline-quality RNG, displacing fossil fuels while slashing emissions. Impact to date includes abatement tied to more than 170,000 cows and over 2.3M metric tons of CO2e avoided—showing how circular-economy thinking can deliver real grid value at scale.
DG Matrix – Integrating the Power Chain: Led by CEO Haroon Inam, DG Matrix is laser-focused on accelerating power delivery inside the data center. Their “power router” approach emphasizes tight integration of power electronics and controls to move more electrons, more efficiently, from the grid edge to the rack—exactly the kind of systems thinking AI facilities need.
Phinergy – Aluminum-Air Backup Without the Smoke: CEO Emmanuel Levy and team are advancing aluminum-air technology as on-demand, zero-emission backup power. For data centers and telecom, it offers a compelling alternative to diesel gensets—high-energy density, rapid availability, and a cleaner path to meeting uptime and sustainability targets.
Via Photon – Smarter Fiber for AI Factories: Via Photon tackled one of the most overlooked challenges in AI infrastructure: fiber optic cabling. With gigawatt-scale facilities requiring up to 10 million strands of fiber, their pre-terminated, factory-tested modules cut installation time, reduce rework, and protect against damage, helping data centers go live faster and at lower risk.
Hyper – Reinventing Supply Chains: Hyper is rethinking how we build critical power infrastructure. By tapping latent capacity in adjacent industries like aerospace and automotive, they can rapidly scale manufacturing of switchboards, PDUs, and RPPs. Paired with their Hyperspace portal, they offer end-to-end transparency and QA so customers get certainty in an uncertain supply chain.
Blumen – AI for Permitting: Blumen addressed a pain point every developer knows too well: permitting delays. Their platform digitizes zoning codes and merges them with thousands of geographic datasets, using AI to analyze requirements in hours instead of months. For data centers facing new local rules, that speed can be the difference between breaking ground or walking away.
DUG – Immersion Cooling & Modularity: DUG has proven immersion cooling at scale with near-optimal efficiency, and is now packaging that capability into modular “Nomad” units—10-foot and 40-foot containers that can be shipped, deployed, and plugged in quickly. The result: sustainable, mobile compute capacity with PUEs as low as ~1.03.
Mod42 – Modular Data Centers: Mod42 takes a ground-up modular approach. Their factory-built data centers can deploy up to 60% faster and at lower cost than traditional builds, while reducing land disturbance and improving site density, exactly the combination the AI era needs to scale responsibly.
Lessons from the Arena
Across the sessions, a few themes consistently emerged.
First, efficiency is non-negotiable. Every presentation, whether explicitly or not, touched on how solutions must reduce environmental impact. Our industry is under increasing pressure to deliver on efficiency goals, and innovators are stepping up.
Many of the best concepts drew on adjacent disciplines—agriculture, materials science, industrial engineering—bringing fresh tools to familiar problems in compute, power, and cooling.
And thirdly, the ecosystem matters. Even the most brilliant innovation needs a supportive ecosystem of investors, policymakers, and infrastructure providers to move from concept to scale. Many presenters acknowledged this, speaking to how they plan to bridge the gap from prototype to production.
Harnessing Tech for a Better Future
Serving as a judge was both an honor and a learning experience. The energy of the presenters was infectious, and their passion reminded me why I fell in love with this industry in the first place. Too often, we get caught up in the incremental—the next quarter, the next benchmark, the next feature release. Innovate Arena reminded me of the importance of stepping back to look at the big picture: where is the world headed, and how can technology be harnessed to make it better?
Props to Yotta for creating this platform. Giving innovators the stage, and giving industry leaders the chance to engage with them directly, is how we accelerate progress. The format worked beautifully—part competition, part collaboration, and all inspiration.
Looking Ahead
As I left the Innovate Arena sessions, I felt a renewed sense of optimism. The challenges we face, from energy efficiency in AI infrastructure to sustainable growth in data centers, are real and daunting. But they are not insurmountable. Events like this prove that the ingenuity, creativity, and drive to solve them are alive and well.
My biggest takeaway: innovation lives in barns, in universities, in startups, and in the imaginations of people bold enough to ask, “What if?”
I am grateful for the chance to play a part in this process, and I look forward to seeing how these ideas evolve in the months and years to come.
At Yotta 2025, I had the privilege of judging Innovate Arena sessions—a Shark Tank-style innovation contest in which innovators pitched their latest concepts reimagining how we power, cool, and sustain the digital world.
From the stage, the mix of rigor and audacity was unmistakable. The ideas weren’t incremental; they aimed at what’s next—and they stuck with me.
Innovate Arena spotlighted new approaches to some of the most pressing challenges facing our industry, from infrastructure efficiency to breakthrough applications. My role as judge gave me a front-row seat to entrepreneurs and visionaries who are imagining new tech frontiers.
Innovation From All Angles
What struck me most throughout the sessions was the diversity of ideas. Some solutions were deeply technical, drilling into hardware optimization and software integration. Others were transformative in their vision—rethinking the very inputs we use to generate and deliver power. The range itself underscored that innovation isn’t one-size-fits-all. The answers to today’s challenges will come from unexpected directions, and we need to create more venues like this to give them visibility and foster open collaboration.
Judging these sessions was a blast. I got to kick the tires on bold ideas, press on the business logic, and challenge assumptions. The energy from startups and smaller teams was palpable—the spark that keeps this industry moving.
Highlights from Innovation Arena
Several presentations stood out for the way they attacked real bottlenecks across the AI landscape—everything from how we move electrons to how we pull permits. We saw farm-level methane captured and upgraded into RNG to decarbonize energy inputs, a tightly integrated power chain to accelerate delivery inside the data center, and aluminum-air systems offering cleaner, on-demand backup power. Add in smarter fiber deployments at giga-scale, a reimagined critical-power supply chain, AI that compresses permitting from months to hours, and modular/immersion builds that deploy fast with ultra-low PUEs—and you get a snapshot of innovation that’s practical, scalable, and ready for the AI era.
Amp Americas – Turning Manure into Megawatts: Capturing methane from dairy operations and upgrading it into pipeline-quality RNG, displacing fossil fuels while slashing emissions. Impact to date includes abatement tied to more than 170,000 cows and over 2.3M metric tons of CO2e avoided—showing how circular-economy thinking can deliver real grid value at scale.
DG Matrix – Integrating the Power Chain: Led by CEO Haroon Inam, DG Matrix is laser-focused on accelerating power delivery inside the data center. Their “power router” approach emphasizes tight integration of power electronics and controls to move more electrons, more efficiently, from the grid edge to the rack—exactly the kind of systems thinking AI facilities need.
Phinergy – Aluminum-Air Backup Without the Smoke: CEO Emmanuel Levy and team are advancing aluminum-air technology as on-demand, zero-emission backup power. For data centers and telecom, it offers a compelling alternative to diesel gensets—high-energy density, rapid availability, and a cleaner path to meeting uptime and sustainability targets.
Via Photon – Smarter Fiber for AI Factories: Via Photon tackled one of the most overlooked challenges in AI infrastructure: fiber optic cabling. With gigawatt-scale facilities requiring up to 10 million strands of fiber, their pre-terminated, factory-tested modules cut installation time, reduce rework, and protect against damage, helping data centers go live faster and at lower risk.
Hyper – Reinventing Supply Chains: Hyper is rethinking how we build critical power infrastructure. By tapping latent capacity in adjacent industries like aerospace and automotive, they can rapidly scale manufacturing of switchboards, PDUs, and RPPs. Paired with their Hyperspace portal, they offer end-to-end transparency and QA so customers get certainty in an uncertain supply chain.
Blumen – AI for Permitting: Blumen addressed a pain point every developer knows too well: permitting delays. Their platform digitizes zoning codes and merges them with thousands of geographic datasets, using AI to analyze requirements in hours instead of months. For data centers facing new local rules, that speed can be the difference between breaking ground or walking away.
DUG – Immersion Cooling & Modularity: DUG has proven immersion cooling at scale with near-optimal efficiency, and is now packaging that capability into modular “Nomad” units—10-foot and 40-foot containers that can be shipped, deployed, and plugged in quickly. The result: sustainable, mobile compute capacity with PUEs as low as ~1.03.
Mod42 – Modular Data Centers: Mod42 takes a ground-up modular approach. Their factory-built data centers can deploy up to 60% faster and at lower cost than traditional builds, while reducing land disturbance and improving site density, exactly the combination the AI era needs to scale responsibly.
Lessons from the Arena
Across the sessions, a few themes consistently emerged.
First, efficiency is non-negotiable. Every presentation, whether explicitly or not, touched on how solutions must reduce environmental impact. Our industry is under increasing pressure to deliver on efficiency goals, and innovators are stepping up.
Many of the best concepts drew on adjacent disciplines—agriculture, materials science, industrial engineering—bringing fresh tools to familiar problems in compute, power, and cooling.
And thirdly, the ecosystem matters. Even the most brilliant innovation needs a supportive ecosystem of investors, policymakers, and infrastructure providers to move from concept to scale. Many presenters acknowledged this, speaking to how they plan to bridge the gap from prototype to production.
Harnessing Tech for a Better Future
Serving as a judge was both an honor and a learning experience. The energy of the presenters was infectious, and their passion reminded me why I fell in love with this industry in the first place. Too often, we get caught up in the incremental—the next quarter, the next benchmark, the next feature release. Innovate Arena reminded me of the importance of stepping back to look at the big picture: where is the world headed, and how can technology be harnessed to make it better?
Props to Yotta for creating this platform. Giving innovators the stage, and giving industry leaders the chance to engage with them directly, is how we accelerate progress. The format worked beautifully—part competition, part collaboration, and all inspiration.
Looking Ahead
As I left the Innovate Arena sessions, I felt a renewed sense of optimism. The challenges we face, from energy efficiency in AI infrastructure to sustainable growth in data centers, are real and daunting. But they are not insurmountable. Events like this prove that the ingenuity, creativity, and drive to solve them are alive and well.
My biggest takeaway: innovation lives in barns, in universities, in startups, and in the imaginations of people bold enough to ask, “What if?”
I am grateful for the chance to play a part in this process, and I look forward to seeing how these ideas evolve in the months and years to come.
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