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🏗️ AI runs on software, but it scales on infrastructure

For the past few years, most of the focus sat at the model layer. Bigger models, better outputs, faster iteration cycles. That’s where the attention went, and for a while, that’s where the bottlenecks lived.

That pressure has moved. What determines progress now sits lower in the stack, inside the physical systems that support everything above it. The limiting factor is no longer what can be built in software, it’s what can be sustained in the real world once it’s deployed.

The pace of buildout makes that clear. It’s industrial scale, happening fast enough to strain every dependency at once. Timelines are compressed, supply chains are tight, and multiple layers that used to operate independently now have to line up at the same moment for anything to come online cleanly.

Insight coming from Infrastructure Masons State of the Digital Infrastructure Industry 2026 report tracks how much of this is already in motion across construction, power, and compute, and how tightly those layers are starting to bind together.

That level of activity doesn’t move cleanly through a fragmented system.

Demand is increasingly being committed early. Capital is deployed ahead of delivery, capacity is often pre-allocated, and projects are moving forward with strong expectations that usage will be there when systems go live.

What determines success is whether that capacity can actually be delivered. Power sits at the center of that equation. Access to it, timing of it, and the ability to scale it reliably over time. In major markets, timelines to secure meaningful power can extend for years. That forces demand to move. Infrastructure is shifting toward regions where power can be secured with certainty, even if those regions weren’t part of the original footprint.

At the same time, the scale of what’s being built keeps increasing. Individual facilities have turned into multi-site campuses. Megawatt targets continue to climb. Delivery timelines are being pushed down even as project scope expands. More has to be built, and it has to come online faster, under tighter constraints.

That combination forces everything into the same frame. Energy, policy, capital, and local support aren’t separate tracks anymore. They show up together, and they have to be solved together. Projects are negotiated earlier, scrutinized more closely, and shaped by factors that extend well beyond the data center itself.

You can see the pressure building. Communities are more engaged, regulators are adapting in real time, and developers are being brought into conversations earlier than before. With less room to operate quietly in the background. The ability to secure approval and maintain support carries as much weight as technical execution.

At the same time, the underlying systems are being rebuilt to handle densities and workloads that didn’t exist even a few years ago. Power delivery, cooling strategies, and facility design are all under pressure to evolve at the same pace as the workloads they support.

Geography follows those constraints. The next wave expands beyond traditional hubs into regions where the full set of requirements can be met at once, power access, permitting alignment, capital flow, and local support.

That’s the shift that tends to get underestimated. AI runs on software, but it scales on infrastructure. Right now, the question isn’t what can be built at the model layer. It’s what the system can actually carry.

Featured Panel: AC to DC: Powering the AI Era

Because this shift isn’t theoretical anymore, it’s operational. The transition from 15 kW racks to 600 kW+ systems isn’t just a hardware upgrade, it’s a complete re-architecture of how power is generated, delivered, and consumed across the stack.

This conversation brings together the operators sitting at the center of that transition—from hyperscale data center buildouts to next-generation power systems engineering—to unpack what it actually takes to deliver capacity at this scale. Not in models or projections, but in live deployments happening right now.

The panel will focus on the real constraints shaping the next wave of AI infrastructure:

• How power availability is dictating geography and timelines

• What it takes to move from legacy AC systems to high-voltage DC architectures

• How operators are redesigning facilities for extreme density and liquid-cooled environments

• Where efficiency gains are real—and where physics still wins

This is where the abstract conversations about “AI scale” get grounded in execution. Because the question is no longer how fast models can advance. It’s how fast infrastructure can keep up.

Spotlight: Infrastructure Masons

iMasons is a global nonprofit association of digital infrastructure industry professionals. Digital infrastructure is the information technology equipment that transmits, processes and stores data, the facilities that house that equipment and the networks that connect them all.

Industry veteran Dean Nelson founded iMasons in April 2016 to unite the builders of the digital age on a mission to aggregate, amplify, and apply their ideas, insights and initiatives to develop a greater digital future. Today, iMasons has more than 6,000 members, in more than 130 countries, representing more than $1.5 trillion in digital infrastructure deployments.

What iMasons Does (PIE: People, Innovation, Efficiency)

• Creates a neutral forum to define priorities, standards, and direction for the industry

• Builds a trusted global community where individuals come together to collaborate

• Advances workforce development to close the talent gap at scale

• Drives innovation through initiatives that turn conversation into action

• Champions efficiency and sustainability across power, infrastructure, and operations

Why It Matters

• Digital infrastructure is essential to how society functions. Demand is accelerating faster than coordination, trust, and shared understanding.

• iMasons exists to bring clarity, alignment, and accountability to an industry shaping the future. Not just to connect people, but to turn intent into action at the right time

Who It Serves

• The current and next generation of leaders, operators, and builders across the digital infrastructure industry. 

Bay Area Startups Collectively Secured $3B in April MTD

Q2 started off quietly but picked up as business uncertainty around global events decreased. The April total hit $3B as funding activity increased this week. The eight megadeals so far were evenly spread between transportation, biotech, cleantech, fintech, computer networking and (of course) AI.

Exits, IPOs: SV Tech IPOs have been quiet since February, but this week Fremont-based Alamar Biosciences raised $191M in its IPO, pricing at the top of its $15 - $17 range. The company reacted to strong demand by upsizing their offering from 9.4 to 11.3 million shares, and their stock surged 40% in the first day of trading, taking their market valuation from $1.1B to $1.6B. Alamar raised over $300M from Illumina Ventures, Morningside Ventures, Sherpa Healthcare Partners and others. Their pre-IPO high valuation was $240M in 2023, making this an “up” IPO.

Webinar Alert & Date Change: The Fundraising with LinkSV series has been moved back one week to April 29. We'll cover when to start preparing and introduce a new tool for finding investors, customers and networking. Two attendees will receive 90-day Entrepreneur memberships, plus an individual session/deep dive on finding prospective investors with LinkSV. Interested? Register here for the link.

Early Stage:

• Mariana Minerals closed a $73.5M Series A, software-first, vertically integrated minerals company supplying the minerals critical to modern energy, AI, and defense technologies.

• Resolve AI closed a $40M Series A, AI for running and operating software in production, which underpins how businesses operate.

• Parasail AI closed a $32M Series A, delivering a programmable deployment network that gives AI builders production-ready endpoints in minutes.

• HexemBio closed a $10.4M Seed, developing regenerative therapies to rejuvenate aging blood stem cells.

• Ultralight closed a $9.3M Seed, unifies EHR, practice management, and patient engagement with powerful AI natively built in.

Growth Stage:

• Factory closed a $150M Series C, pioneering agent-native development.

• Slash Financial closed a $100M Series C, a single platform purpose-built for the financial workflows of modern businesses

• Zum closed a $100M Private Equity, managing every vehicle, driver, student passenger, parent, and ride on the Zum CMX™ platform.

• Loop Payments closed a $95M Series C, a full-stack, verticalized AI platform for logistics and supply chains.

• HockeyStack closed a $50M Series B, the enterprise revenue intelligence platform built on an event-based data architecture.

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Logan Lemery
Head of Content // Team Ignite

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