The Neuron: AI Explained
The "Android Moment" for AI Infrastructure: Why Modular Just Raised $250M
26 Nov 2025
While everyone obsesses over which AI model is smartest, a quiet revolution is happening in the infrastructure layer underneath. Modular just raised $250M at a $1.6B valuation to solve a problem most people don't know exists: AI is locked into expensive, vendor-specific hardware ecosystems. Tim Davis, Co-Founder & President of Modular, joins us to explain why his company is building the "hypervisor for AI"—making it possible to write code once and run it on any GPU, from NVIDIA to AMD to Apple Silicon. We dive into why this matters for businesses, what the Android analogy really means, how companies are seeing 70-80% cost reductions, and whether we're even on the right path to superintelligence.Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.aiTry Modular: https://modular.comGetting Started Guide: https://modular.com/get-started
Full Episode
Most folks may not understand that when you take a photo, you're using AI. When you search for something, obviously you're using AI. Even when you pull down and look at applications on your phone, you're using AI. Increasingly now, even when you're typing on your keyboard, you are using AI. There is pattern recognition in the predictive text that you're doing.
similar creatures and I think recommendation systems have proven that over time. All of that needed to be powered by infrastructure. The world is actually quite hard for an AI engineer. It's not like you just train a model and then amazingly it just deploys everywhere. That's not actually how the infrastructure works.
Welcome, humans, to The Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, as always, joined by the one and only Grant Harvey, who writes The Neuron every day. Today, we're going to talk AI infrastructure and whatever else comes to mind with Tim Davis, co-founder and president of Modular. It's a company that has raised $250 million to change how AI runs on hardware. Tim, welcome to The Neuron.
Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks very much for having me. Congratulations on the raise as well. You know, that's exciting stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know, I've always viewed, you know, so fundraising, you know, is an interesting process. I'm happy to walk through it. And we have a unique methodology, I think, that we've taken in fundraising.
But yeah, in many ways, it's just, you know, we're excited that we have people who believe in our vision and what we're trying to achieve. And yeah, I'd love to talk to you both about that and other questions today.
Well, I guess to start out, you're with Modular, and I understand that you and your co-founder are both from Google Brain, right?
Yeah, so maybe a little bit about me and a little bit about the background of the company. So I spent, yeah, it was probably six years, six or seven years at Google, a lot of that inside Google Brain. And that's actually where I met Chris Lattner, who is a very renowned engineer.
And he was brought in to help bring up some of the TPU infrastructure, which is sort of Google's custom silicon for running AI models. Before that, Chris was at Apple. And then before that, had done a lot of other things in his career. LLVM, which is an open sort of compiler. Open Source Compiler Foundation.
And so we had been working on an infrastructure platform called TensorFlow, which was one of the original machine learning and AI frameworks at Google. And Google had released that really to provide the world with the ability to build AI models and in many ways help, this was back in 2015, 2016, help build begin to democratize AI. They had actually just acquired DeepMind at the time.
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