In The Arena by TechArena

Hosted by Allyson Klein

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Episodes

266

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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About the show

In The Arena by TechArena is your source for authentic conversations with the leading innovators in technology. The show is hosted by long time industry insider Allyson Klein

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60 recent

October 12, 202626 min

Schneider Electric’s Jim Simonelli on Breaking AI’s Power Wall

At Yotta 2026 in Las Vegas, Allyson Klein sat down with Jim Simonelli, SVP and CTO of data center business at Schneider Electric, Simonelli explains why IT moving on six-month cycles and power access running on six- to 10-year cycles makes the data center a systems problem. He covers why rack densities of 600 kilowatts to 1 megawatt drive the move to 800 VDC, and how Schneider’s new Software-Defined Medium Voltage switchgear separates the physical build from protection programming to speed time to power.

August 25, 202621 min

Ken Sun of AMI on Firmware, Fragmentation & AI Infrastructure

In this episode of The Control Plane, host Allyson Klein is joined by Ken Sun, Corporate Vice President at AMI, a Lattice company, for a wide-ranging conversation about firmware's growing strategic importance across the AI infrastructure stack. Ken brings a perspective shaped by years across service providers and cloud infrastructure, and frames firmware as the connective layer binding together the five layers of the modern tech stack: energy, silicon, cloud, models, and applications.

August 18, 202632 min

Scott Robohn of Solutional on NetDevOps for AI Networks

Scott Robohn, CEO of Solutional, co-founder of the Network Automation Forum, and consulting CTO at Carahsoft, joins Hedgehog founder and CEO Marc Austin to talk about why AI infrastructure raises the stakes on network automation. They cover NetDevOps, the talent gap in network engineering, deterministic scripting versus agentic AI, and where reference architectures fall short at scale.

August 17, 202620 min

Phononic's Thermal Fabric: Precision Cooling for AI

Heat has become the real ceiling on AI performance. In this episode of In the Arena, Allyson Klein talks with Matt Langman, SVP and GM of Infrastructure at Phononic, about why hotspots are multiplying across the rack and what to do about them.

August 17, 202626 min

OCP's Zane Ball on the Open AI Era and Chip-to-Grid Vision

In this episode of The Control Plane sponsored by AMI, recorded at the OCP EMEA Summit in Barcelona, host Allyson Klein sits down with Zane Ball, Chief Technical Officer of the Open Compute Project Foundation, and Colin Brix, Vice President of Marketing at AMI, for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of open hardware, the rising importance of firmware across AI infrastructure, and the emerging chip-to-grid era reshaping how the industry designs data centers.

August 12, 202626 min

Q-CTRL on Quantum Computing’s Path to Production

Quantum computing is moving out of the lab and into real production environments. In this episode of Data Insights, recorded live at Xcelerated Compute in New York, Allyson Klein and Jeniece Wnorowski sit down with Alex Shih, VP of Product at Q-CTRL, to unpack what that transition actually looks like.

August 11, 202618 min

HPE's Trish Damkroger on the Convergence of HPC and AI

TechArena's Allyson Klein sits down with Trish Damkroger, SVP and GM of HPC and AI Business at HPE, for a look at the machines behind modern science and AI. They cover the convergence of HPC and AI, the engineering behind the Cray GX 5000 platform, 100% liquid-cooled racks reaching 400 kilowatts, the rise of sovereign AI, HPE's lead on the Green 500, the new NVIDIA collaborations, and what it takes to deliver a supercomputer customers commit to years before the silicon ships.

August 6, 202622 min

Google's Bill Magro on AI, HPC, & the Future of Scientific Computing

In this episode of In the Arena, Allyson Klein sits down with Bill Magro, Global Director and Chief Technologist of High Performance Computing at Google, for a wide-ranging look at where scientific and technical computing is headed. Bill explains how Google Cloud approached HPC by meeting customers where they are, letting researchers bring their existing binaries and workflows without rewriting for the cloud.

July 29, 202634 min

Broadcom's Hasan Siraj on Why the Network Is AI's Computer

Networking has quietly become a decisive variable in AI infrastructure performance. In this episode of The AI Hedge, host Marc Austin talks with Hasan Siraj, VP of Products at Broadcom, about why the network functions as the computer for modern AI clusters.

July 28, 202614 min

Inside a High-Stakes Infrastructure Overhaul

In this episode of In the Arena, host Allyson Klein sits down with Rakesh Awasthi, a principal software engineer, to explore what it actually takes to modernize legacy data infrastructure at global scale and how AI has fundamentally changed the nature of that work in a preview of his talk at the AI Infra Summit in September 2026.