AI Infra Summit 2026

Ram Nagappan is Vice President in AI Infrastructure at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with 20+ years of “chips-to-grid” experience spanning exascale supercomputers and gigawatt-scale AI data centers. He leads AI infrastructure architecture for large-scale AI and HPC platforms, including OpenAI’s Stargate program, combining executive leadership with hands-on involvement in site diligence, grid interconnection, power-plant architecture, data hall layout, and rack-level design for high-density GPU clusters.

Venkat Ramesh works on the ASIC Architecture Modeling & Performance team at Meta. Over the span of his career, he has worked across the AI Infra stack from storage and HPC clusters to AI accelerators, contributing to projects such a Llama4 training and fleet-wide storage optimizations.

Maher Hanafi is the SVP of Engineering at Betterworks, where he leads the architectural strategy and technical execution for the company’s enterprise-grade AI and HR technology platforms. With more than two decades of experience leading high-scale engineering organizations, Maher is a veteran leader at the intersection of cloud-native infrastructure and production-ready intelligence. Maher’s technical leadership is defined by a rigorous focus on the operational realities of AI within the enterprise. He has spearheaded critical initiatives in optimizing self-hosted AI environments, prioritizing data governance and privacy in highly regulated environments. His work centers on solving the "triple constraint" of modern AI systems: driving maximum throughput and sub-millisecond latency while maintaining a sustainable cost-to-performance ratio at scale. A prolific strategist, Maher has pioneered several modern AI initiatives, such as the AI Decision Framework, the AI Flywheel Framework, and the AI Nexus, a strategic vision for centralizing and scaling intelligence as a core business utility. Beyond his executive role, Maher remains deeply involved in the academic and professional community as a mentor for the Strategic AI Program at the University of San Francisco and a frequent speaker at premier industry events.