AMI’s Ken Sun on Firmware as the Glue Holding AI Infrastructure Together

Investment in AI infrastructure is now measured in the trillions of dollars, and power demand at the largest sites rivals the electricity needs of entire cities. According to Ken Sun, Corporate Vice President AMI, a Lattice company, these numbers indicate why today’s AI buildout is one of the most consequential engineering undertakings in modern history. Ken joined host Allyson Klein on The Control Plane, a TechArena podcast, to talk about why firmware, for long the quietest layer of the data center, has become central to building AI data centers.

Ken came to AMI after roles spanning service providers and cloud infrastructure, and he described the opportunity as a rare moment to help the entire ecosystem, from silicon to OEMs, ODMs, and hyperscalers, collaborate and innovate in new ways. As Corporate Vice President, his focus is go-to-market strategy, ecosystem alignment, and customer success across that effort.

Firmware, the Glue Across Five Layers

The industry commonly describes the modern tech stack in five layers: energy, silicon, cloud, models, and applications. What rarely gets discussed is the layer connecting all five.

“I really see firmware, and platform software to some extent, as critical pieces to help secure, scale, manage and also enable sustainability of your entire AI infrastructure state. Firmware works with all five layers to ensure there is a coherent connection across the layers and across the ecosystem,” said Ken. That positioning also explains why AMI sits across so much of the value chain, working with power and cooling vendors, silicon providers, OEMs, ODMs, hyperscalers, neo-clouds, and open source communities alike.

The Five-Headed Hydra

Ken credited Sanjoy Maity, SVP and Business Unit Leader, at AMI, a Lattice Company, with a phrase he has embraced: the five-headed Hydra.

“You can’t tackle any one of these challenges on its own, it seems like whenever you have control over one of them, another problem arises,” he said, referring to challenges posed by fragmentation, security, power and thermal management, and fleet management. AMI’s answer leans on firmware, transparency, and open standards.

The company is among the leading contributors to the Open Compute Project and to OpenBMC, work Ken sees as double-edged: open source accelerates innovation on a common stack, but can lead to more fragmentation if left unmanaged. AMI’s response is its MegaRAC Community Edition, an effort to streamline and upstream disparate open source contributions into a more unified base, paired with the services and support customers need across design, deployment, and maintenance.

Lessons From Computex

Ken’s team recently returned from Computex in Taipei, and he pointed to several trends that stood out. He was impressed at seeing the pace of innovation in action, as systems became more modular, more compact, and easier to build, operate, and deploy than just a year earlier. Rack-level boot and management is a growing challenge as operators now boot and manage hundreds of nodes per rack, and power and cooling have become dynamic rather than static, which Ken called one of the toughest parts of the equation the industry is solving for. He also highlighted predictive failure as an emerging goal: managing fleets, including aging ones, with less human intervention through self-awareness and self-healing capabilities. Modular, plug-and-play design at both the hardware and firmware level, he added, is increasingly aimed at accelerating time to market.

Security, Regulation, and the Trusted Partner Model

“Security has shifted from being a design check box to just board level mandate,” Ken said, showing up in every part of the stack, from hardware up through the models. In his view, every component now needs hardware root of trust attestation, with crypto agility increasingly required to prepare for post-quantum threats. Regulation adds another layer of complexity: the EU Cyber Resilience Act extends requirements well beyond secure coding practices into vulnerability management, firmware update processes, documentation, and incident response across a product’s lifecycle.

The customer conversation has shifted as a result. “Rather than debating which technology or which route to trust to pick, customers are asking if they have a trusted partner to work with and not just a supplier,” he said. That distinction is the role AMI wants to play across its 40 years of relationships with silicon partners, ODMs, and operators.

Key takeaway

Ken Sun’s conversation makes a clear case that firmware has moved from background utility to strategic layer. As AI infrastructure investment climbs into the trillions and power needs rival small cities, the five-headed Hydra of fragmentation, security, power and thermal management, and fleet management can no longer be solved piecemeal. AMI’s bet is that customers will find value in their open source contribution paired with services, security IP, and lifecycle support, over point solutions. For data center leaders navigating rising regulatory demands and dynamic power and cooling requirements, the real question Ken poses is not which technology to pick, but which partner can be trusted with the full lifecycle.

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