WP Intelligence - Founders at the frontier: Shaping the next industrial era

The tech economy spent two decades chasing speed. Faster clicks, lighter software, thinner margins between attention and addiction. Now the bill is due. AI did not stall because models failed. It stalled because the grid blinked. January 2026 is the moment the industry admits the real constraint is no longer imagination. It is power, steel, policy, and capital that actually shows up.

That is why Founders at the Frontier lands in Davos, inside the Washington Post Studio, while half the ecosystem is still arguing about prompts. This room is about what happens after intelligence works. When AI stops behaving like a demo and starts behaving like infrastructure, the conversation matures fast. Energy architecture replaces software architecture. National strategy replaces growth theater. Valuation takes a back seat to viability.

Aidan Gomez sits at that inflection point. As a co-author of Attention Is All You Need, Aidan Gomez helped create the transformer, then stepped away from consumer spectacle to build Cohere as enterprise-grade intelligence. At a $5.5B valuation and roughly 400 employees, Cohere does not chase eyeballs. It embeds reasoning into insurance underwriting, mining bids, and professional services workflows. Backed by Salesforce and Oracle, this is AI that lives inside balance sheets, not browser tabs.

Varun Sivaram is why those systems can stay powered. Founded in Nov 2024, Emerald AI raised $42.5M in its first year by addressing a simple truth. AI workloads are flexible even when grids are not. Emerald Conductor orchestrates compute in real time, already deployed with partners including Oracle, Nvidia, EPRI, and Salt River Project. Varun Sivaram is not theorizing. Former Managing Director for Clean Energy at the U.S. State Department and ex-Ørsted executive, he understands energy as strategy. Unlocking 100GW is not hype. It is survival math.

Aaron Zubaty proves capital still matters. Eolian is not software cosplaying as infrastructure. It is infrastructure attracting infrastructure money. With $2.5B in equity from Global Infrastructure Partners and more than 21GW developed, Aaron Zubaty operates in a world measured by MW, tax equity, and uptime. Stanford-trained, AES-tested, utility-scale serious, this is how ambition survives regulation.

Moderated by Luiza Savage, Editorial Director at Washington Post Intelligence, this is not a panel designed for applause. It is a working conversation inside Davos scarcity. One hour. Three layers of the stack. Software, power, capital. None of them win alone.

AI is no longer asking what it can do. It is asking who is willing to build what it needs. And that question is quietly rearranging the entire room.