Building the backbone of AI with Mahdi Yahya, Co-Founder @ Radiant on Compute, Power and the Future of Infrastructure
13 May 2026

Building the backbone of AI with Mahdi Yahya, Co-Founder @ Radiant on Compute, Power and the Future of Infrastructure

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

About

Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO of Ori, is now part of Radiant following its partnership with Brookfield.

Mahdi is building at the centre of one of the most important shifts in technology: the global race to scale AI infrastructure.

We cover:

     From telecoms to data centres: lessons from building infrastructure businesses from age 20  Why Ori chose the harder path of building for a future that did not yet exist  What “AI infrastructure” actually means, from GPU clusters to orchestration software  The Radiant model: combining capital, power, compute and software into a single platform  Why AI is becoming sovereign infrastructure and what that means for governments  Where value will accrue in the AI stack across hardware, infrastructure and applications  The importance of vertical integration and marginal gains in a capital-intensive market  Two pivotal decisions that shaped the company, including early acquisition and moving into physical infrastructure  Founder resilience and the simple rule: stay alive 

Mahdi also shares his perspective on the next wave of AI companies, the opportunity in inference, and why robotics could be the next breakout category.

This is a conversation about building at civilisational scale and what it takes to operate where technology, capital and infrastructure collide.