San Francisco Bay Area
Frontier AI scaling fails quietly — not in model collapse, but in infrastructure fragility. I work on the grid engineering layer that determines how fast AI infrastructure actually energizes. The protection coordination bottleneck between procuring power and delivering it safely is the constraint I've spent a decade solving across 30+ countries and four major U.S. ISOs (MISO, PJM, CAISO, ERCOT). In 2019, I funded and led the world's first virtualized protection relay demonstration in partnership with Southern California Edison and Salt River Project — validated within the IEC 61850 framework. That work became the foundation for co-founding the vPAC Alliance in 2023 — now a coalition of 35+ utilities, OEMs, and technology companies including ABB, Siemens Energy, and GE Vernova. At DistribuTECH 2026, three major OEMs announced commercial products based on the architecture. This is no longer a concept. It's an emerging commercial reality. The core thesis: every AI data center that self-powers, operates behind the meter, or co-locates with generation faces a protection coordination challenge that traditional utility frameworks aren't structured to handle at scale. Software-defined protection compresses the sequential engineering bottleneck that currently adds 12–18 months to interconnection timelines for loads above 200 MW. As AI workloads push campus power into gigawatt territory with increasingly dynamic load profiles, the intersection of grid-side protection and compute-side power behavior is where the hardest unsolved problems live. At Intel, I lead the Energy & Utility segment globally, managing strategy across utilities, OEMs, and infrastructure partners in 30+ countries — where I've built two industry coalitions from scratch and created a market category that generated $300M+ in ecosystem revenue.
Energy strategy is now a research velocity variable. I operate at the intersection of frontier AI compute scale and grid architecture — securing and structuring power systems capable of supporting 300–700MW AI campuses with deterministic energization timelines. At Intel, I led infrastructure platform strategy and ecosystem development across utilities, OEMs, regulators, and industrial partners, delivering over $1B in measurable impact. My work transformed substations and grid control layers from hardware-defined assets into software-defined platforms — reducing redesign cycles, accelerating commissioning, and increasing deployment certainty. In frontier AI environments, interconnection delays, protection redesigns, and substation constraints do not create operational inconvenience — they directly influence model release cadence. I build architectures that remove those constraints. In 2023, I founded and led the vPAC Alliance, aligning global utilities, technology providers, and standards bodies around virtualized protection and control frameworks. The objective: compress time-to-power, reduce late-stage infrastructure risk, and introduce software-defined determinism into critical grid systems. My experience spans: • Multi-hundred-megawatt power procurement strategy • Utility partnership structuring and regulatory alignment • Software-defined substations & virtualized protection • CAPEX integration across compute + transmission pathways • Grid resilience as an AI safety dependency Frontier AI leadership will be defined not only by model capability — but by the certainty of the systems that power it. I focus on ensuring capability can scale with infrastructure confidence.
Defined product strategy for intelligent distribution line sensors and grid analytics platforms using machine learning for real-time fault detection and grid health monitoring, early application of ML to grid operational technology. Advised on substation modernization strategy and developed ROI frameworks for grid infrastructure investment decisions, direct experience inside one of nation’s largest IOUs navigating capex planning process that determines interconnection capacity and timelines.
Negotiated and signed strategic partnership agreements with global utility customers including CFE (Mexico), expanding grid technology adoption across emerging markets.
Owned end-to-end product lifecycle for RPMA wireless networking platform. Signed strategic partnership with General Electric for industrial IoT infrastructure, experience in scaling infrastructure technology through major OEM channels
Led product and partnership strategy for a $250M IoT software platform powering smart metering infrastructure across North American and international utilities, building deep expertise in AMI networks and the software layer between grid hardware and utility operations, the exact layer that vPAC now aims to virtualize.