AI & Chips Summit 2026 (AICA)

A one-day conference on the hardware end of AI - chips, compute, energy and the data layer underneath the models - rather than another applications day. The AICA Foundation runs it, and the programme is built around three plenaries: The Stack Under Strain: Bytes, Joules, Trust at 09:10, a position debate at 14:30 on whether pre-training scaling is over with the audience voting before and after, and Physical Computing Strikes Back closing at 17:20. Speakers include Holger Hoos of RWTH Aachen, Sumeet Kumar of neuromorphic chip firm Innatera, Marco van Hurne of ASML and Olivier Oomen of HallTech. The hosts are Etienne van 't Kruys, Eman Cickusic, Bauke Brenninkmeijer and Robert Caulk. General admission is 200 euro plus booking fees, at KIT Amsterdam. Why go: the only Amsterdam room this autumn where semiconductor, infrastructure and ML-research people argue the same question in front of each other. Best for anyone whose work touches inference cost, hardware or model efficiency.