Amir Salek

Amir Salek is an electrical engineer and technology executive working on custom silicon design and artificial intelligence hardware development. He was part of Google's custom silicon organization responsible for developing the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) family and related specialized processors, and currently serves as a Senior Managing Director at Cerberus Capital Management. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Career

NVIDIA Prior to joining Google, Salek spent approximately eight years at NVIDIA as a Senior Director of Engineering. During his tenure at NVIDIA, he founded and led the company's System-on-a-Chip (SoC) Design organization and contributed to the development of NVIDIA's GPU and Tegra product lines. As founder and head of Custom Silicon for Google Technical Infrastructure and Google Cloud, Salek directed the development and deployment of multiple generations of specialized processors. According to the Financial Times Tech Tonic podcast, Salek was "the brains behind Google's TPU chip," playing a key role in developing the TPU architecture specifically designed for AI tasks. Under his leadership, the organization developed Google's first production custom silicon chip and created the Tensor Processing Unit family, which includes:

TPU (Google's first production custom silicon chip) TPUv2 (the industry's first production deep-learning training chip) TPUv3 (an enhanced training processor with doubled matrix multiply units and improved memory bandwidth) Edge TPU (a compact deep learning accelerator for edge devices) VCU (Video Coding Unit) IPU (Image Processing Unit) OpenTitan (an open-source security chip)

Throughout his tenure at Google from 2013 to 2022, Salek oversaw the strategic direction of custom silicon development for machine learning, networking, graphics, video, and mobile processors. His organization's work established custom silicon design as a core competency at Google, and the TPU architecture became instrumental in the company's infrastructure and influenced the broader industry's adoption of specialized AI accelerators.

Cerberus Capital Management In March 2022, Salek joined Cerberus Capital Management as a Senior Managing Director and Partner of Tracker Ventures, Cerberus' stage-agnostic venture capital platform focused on investments in deep technology companies. In this role, he leads strategic investments in sectors including semiconductors, edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, 5G infrastructure, autonomous systems, aerospace, next-generation compute platforms, cybersecurity, and Web 3.0 technologies.

Legacy and impact Salek's work in establishing Google's custom silicon capabilities demonstrated the viability of rapid application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) development and deployment at hyperscale, establishing a model that has since been adopted across the technology industry. The TPU family has become foundational to Google's infrastructure and has influenced the broader industry's shift toward purpose-built processors for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads.