Mr. Alper ILKBAHAR
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Sandisk Corporation
Alper Ilkbahar is executive vice president, CTO at Sandisk, overseeing NAND technology development, next-generation technologies, corporate research functions, and market development. Most recently, Ilkbahar served as senior vice president of Global Strategy and Technology at Western Digital. Prior to Western Digital, he was the vice president of the Data Center Group and general manager of the Intel Optane Group. In this role, he supported the development of memory and storage solutions by integrating innovative hardware and software for next-generation data centers around Optane Technology.
Ilkbahar served as vice president and general manager of several business units at Sandisk. He started his career in Intel’s microprocessor division, where he worked in design engineering and management.
A leader who has honed his technical expertise, Ilkbahar holds more than 50 patents in the fields of semiconductor process, device, design, and testing.
Ilkbahar received a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, and a master’s in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Keynote 3
AI Paradigm Shift: From Compute Centric to Memory Centric AI
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift as AI models scale and context rich inference workloads expand. Performance, scalability, and cost are no longer constrained primarily by compute, but by memory capacity, bandwidth, power efficiency, and economics. The industry is increasingly confronting a memory wall that limits how far conventional system architectures can scale.
This presentation examines why traditional DRAM only approaches increasingly underserve next generation AI workloads in many areas and explores the implications of this shift for AI infrastructure. It highlights the need for application-specific memory architectures, including NAND and High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), that deliver scalable capacity density, bandwidth, and system level efficiency reshaping the foundation of AI systems.