Rare Earth Rush: Strategic Minerals and Tech's New Resource Wars

Artificial intelligence is often discussed through models and GPUs. This episode looks beneath that surface, at the power delivery and networking required to make AI work at scale.

Host Sriram Viswanathan speaks with Rajiv Khemani, a serial deep tech entrepreneur whose career has tracked several major infrastructure cycles: internet networking, cloud switching, blockchain compute and now AI networking. Khemani reflects on his early work at NetBoost and Intel, his operating role at Cavium, and the founding of Innovium, which Marvell agreed to acquire for $1.1 billion in 2021. He also explains how work on low-power blockchain silicon led his team toward the infrastructure demands created by generative AI.

The discussion examines why incumbents often overlook emerging markets, why purpose-built hardware can outperform systems inherited from an earlier technology cycle, and how founders decide whether to keep financing a company or sell while the outcome remains attractive. Khemani describes the concentration risk of selling to a small number of hyperscalers, the fragility of semiconductor supply chains, and why leading-edge chip development now demands much larger balance sheets.

The conversation then turns to AI’s emerging bottlenecks. Large models require many accelerators to operate as one computer, making low-latency scale-up and scale-out networks central to performance. The episode explores heterogeneous compute, open networking standards, memory scarcity, AI’s growing electricity demand, and the competition between AI and Bitcoin mining for energy.

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Canada produces world-leading science, engineering, and AI research. So why does so much of that research still commercialize outside of Canada?

In this episode of TechSurge, host Nic Brathwaite puts that question to four leaders at two of Canada's top research universities: Mary Wells (Dean of Engineering) and Chris Houser (Dean of Science) at the University of Waterloo, and Heather Sheardown (Dean of Engineering) and Gianni Parise (VP Research) at McMaster.

At Waterloo, Mary Wells traces how the university's origin produced one of the world's most influential co-op programs and a creator-owned IP policy that lets inventors keep their ideas, making the school a talent engine for global tech. The group digs into Canada's AI paradox, foundational research and talent but far less of the economic value, and what quantum, robotics, and advanced manufacturing show about getting research to market.

McMaster runs a different model, built on health sciences, nuclear research, and problem-based learning. Heather Sheardown explains the McMaster Method and why it matters in an AI-shaped future. Gianni Parise argues for commercialization as a core university function, with work spanning AI-assisted drug discovery, inhaled vaccines, critical-mineral-free motors, and a campus nuclear reactor that supplies much of the world's iodine-125 for prostate cancer treatment. They also unpack Fusion Pharmaceuticals, the McMaster spin-out acquired by AstraZeneca, and what it reveals about university commercialization.

Together, these conversations ask what universities must become in an era defined by AI, deep tech, national competitiveness, and the urgent need to move ideas from the lab into the world.

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Search began as a way to find pages. AI is turning it into a way to ask, reason, decide, and act.

Search has always been more than a technical problem. It is a way of organising knowledge, connecting intent with information, and increasingly, turning questions into actions. In the age of artificial intelligence, that basic function is being redefined.

In this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Vishwanath speaks with Prabhakar Raghavan, Chief Technologist at Google, about the long arc of search: from the early web and link analysis to knowledge graphs, language models, transformers, Gemini, and the unresolved question of how AI will change the way we find, trust, and use information.

Prabhakar reflects on his career as a computer scientist, researcher, and technology leader, beginning with his time at IBM Research, where he worked on algorithms, optimization, databases, and early information retrieval. He explains how the explosion of unstructured data on the web created a new class of technical and economic problems. Search was not simply about indexing pages; it was about imposing structure on a chaotic information environment and building mechanisms that could connect supply, demand, relevance, authority, and trust.

The conversation traces how early search evolved through link analysis and PageRank, drawing on ideas from scholarly citation analysis, graph theory, and algorithmic ranking. Prabhakar describes why authority and trust became central to search as the web grew, and why users themselves changed alongside the technology. As search engines became more capable, people moved from looking for simple webpages to asking richer, more contextual questions that required intent understanding rather than mere document retrieval.

Sriram and Prabhakar then explore the transition from classical search to AI-infused products. Through examples such as Gmail Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Google Drive recommendations, and knowledge graphs, Prabhakar shows how prediction, context, and language modelling were already reshaping user experiences well before the current generative AI wave. These systems were early signals of a broader shift: computers moving from retrieving information to anticipating what users might need next.

The episode also offers a technical tour of the major algorithmic milestones that led to today’s AI systems, including deep learning, sequence-to-sequence models, attention mechanisms, transformers, and the compute architectures needed to train and serve large models. Prabhakar explains why attention changed the quality of language modelling, why AI systems appear increasingly conversational, and why compute remains one of the central constraints in the field.

At the heart of the discussion is the central tension facing search today: if AI systems can generate answers directly, what becomes of search as we know it? Prabhakar does not frame AI as the end of search, but as its next transformation. The future of search may be less about finding a page and more about understanding intent, synthesising knowledge, reasoning through ambiguity, and helping users complete complex tasks.

The conversation closes with deeper questions about AI world models, hallucination, test-time compute, diffusion models, recursive self-improvement, theorem proving, and whether AI systems can ever reason with the same grounded understanding as humans. For Prabhakar, the challenge is not only to build more powerful models, but to understand their limits, failure modes, and relationship to truth.

This episode is a wide-ranging exploration of how search became one of the defining technologies of the internet age—and how artificial intelligence may now force us to rethink what it means to search at all.

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