The last couple of weeks have been filled with news of big-ticket AI acquisitions. It was against this background that I spoke with Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital, a longtime infrastructure investor, former VMware executive, and one of Hedgehog’s earliest backers, for the latest episode of The AI Hedge.
Ashmeet has watched technology cycles come and go, from the desktop PC to mobile to the cloud, so I asked him what makes this one different.
“I would say that we are at the start of another cycle because AI is so transformative. It is a new form of computation that we have invented, and it is going to have an impact on the entire world,” he said. In his view, this shift is “larger than the internet wave, larger than the iPhone, and larger than the desktop PC.”
That conviction shapes the advice he gives enterprise leaders. Ashmeet sees no room to wait and see.
“What I would tell CEOs right now is that you have to embrace it. There’s no other alternative,” he said. He predicts that within ten years the category itself will dissolve, and that every company will be an AI company.
Ashmeet’s instinct for infrastructure goes back to VMware, where he ran product management for ESX Server. He tells the story of how the company nearly took a different path to become a service provider, an early version of what AWS later became.
“I am actually the person responsible for killing that project inside VMware, because I found a much better use case, which was server consolidation in the enterprise,” he said. That pivot proved right and VMware became the undisputed leader in this space.
He sees a similar moment now. AI places radically different demands on infrastructure than the web or application servers enterprises are used to running. That difference calls for an entirely new infrastructure layer built on GPUs, TPUs, and massive data center buildouts, spread across public clouds, new specialized clouds, and a handful of large enterprises running workloads in house.
Ashmeet is emphatic about the role of networking in building this new infrastructure, and it is a big part of why he invested in Hedgehog.
“Networking is the one part of the technology stack that has to be open by definition, where being open gives you benefits that cannot accrue to closed networks,” he said.
The networking industry has seen this played out before, with ATM, SONET, and Token Ring eventually losing out to Ethernet and open standards. “In fact, the very phrase ‘network effect’ comes from networking, because networking is where the benefit accrues exponentially when you are open,” he said. He was unequivocal in predicting that open networking would win in the end.
He extended that logic to NVIDIA. Ashmeet called the Mellanox acquisition brilliant and praised Jensen Huang’s foresight, but argued that proprietary advantages do not last. “I’ll make another prediction that Jensen will be forced to adopt open networking,” he said.
Ashmeet’s parting advice was simple: stay focused on the customer, solve real problems, and build revenue. Architectures will keep changing, but what will not change is the need for data and systems to talk to each other.
If there is one thing to take away from this conversation, it is that AI is not just another cycle but a new form of computation, and the infrastructure underneath it is being rebuilt from the power layer up. Ashmeet's message to enterprise leaders was blunt: embrace AI now or get left behind, because within a decade every company will be an AI company. And through all of it, his belief in open networking holds firm. Open standards have beaten proprietary ones since the days of ATM and token ring. For us at Hedgehog, that is more than just validation, it is the thesis we are building on.
Listen to the full episode here.