For our Season 2 and 2025 finale, Innovation Unplugged welcomes Alex Smith, CEO and co-founder of Nectar Edge - a company redefining how AI workloads are processed at the edge. Jim and Alex explore why AI’s future depends on distributed compute, the inefficiencies of today’s centralized cloud model, and the massive opportunity emerging for telcos and enterprises.

Alex shares Nectar’s founding story, their integrated hardware-plus-software approach, and how their immersion-cooled edge systems and novel workload orchestration platform (“the brain”) deliver sub-20ms inference, dramatic backhaul reduction, and scalable multi-tenant environments. The discussion dives into real-world use cases - from public safety to manufacturing to next-generation advertising - and why adoption has historically been so difficult.

This episode is a deep dive into the infrastructure challenges of the AI era and how Nectar aims to unlock the next wave of real-time intelligence at the far edge.