(Bloomberg) — A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managing director who worked on the US government’s semiconductor-production program was tapped to run an artificial-intelligence chip company at a time when American companies face international competition to cheaply scale AI.
Srujan Linga is taking over as chief executive officer of Lausanne, Switzerland-based Kandou AI. Founder and current CEO Amin Shokrollahi will become chief technology officer. The company, founded in 2011, plans to produce semiconductors for AI cloud-service and hardware providers in the US.
“The age of AI is here,” Linga said. “But the cost of AI systems needs to come down dramatically for it to be ubiquitous.”
In 2023, President Joe Biden’s administration lured Linga away from Goldman to help build Chips for America, a quasi-investment firm intended to ramp up US semiconductor production. Linga, 41, who was a core member of the government’s AI task force within the US Department of Commerce and reported to then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, left the Chips program in January.
Semiconductors, which provide the hardware bedrock of AI, have steep costs and, with recent threats from Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, there’s pressure on US companies to lower prices. Linga said that bottlenecks in the AI memory industry are a barrier for entry, and his firm plans to reduce prices with energy-efficient chips.
The Chips and Science Act, signed Biden in 2022, was a $52 billion bid to revitalize the American semiconductor industry. President Donald Trump has complained that the program is a waste of taxpayer money, and implored Republican lawmakers to scrap the legislation, arguing that tariffs function better than subsidies to encourage investment in the US.
Linga said he’s less concerned with how the Trump administration plans to bring the supply chain to the US and more with the end point.
“It is debatable what is the most effective in terms of incentivizing companies to build more in the US, whether it’s grant or tariffs,” he said. “Getting manufacturing into the US and enabling companies to build emerging technologies is critical for national security purposes. That’s the priority. I’m not concerned about what tariffs will do.”
Rather than return to banking, Linga is leveraging his master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with his experience running a global structured-credit financing group at Goldman, to spearhead Kandou AI’s US rollout.
–With assistance from Sridhar Natarajan.
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