Powering AI: From Chips to AI Factories

Join us for an evening of insight and conversation at the Prosus AI House on Wednesday, April 22 2026. Behind every impressive model sits a stack of infrastructure that determines what can actually be built and deployed. Chips, accelerators, data centres and emerging AI factories shape performance, cost, and speed to market. For an AI audience, this is a grounded conversation about the physical realities that power intelligent systems. 17:00-18:00 AI House open, refreshments ​18:00-19:45 Program ​19:45-20:45 Networking drinks ​​​18:00 The investment landscape: where the money flows - global AI infrastructure spend, European positioning, the most interesting bets across chips, clouds and compute. Sebastiaan Vaessen, Head of Strategy at Prosus ​18:15  Pitches IMChip: brain-inspired chips for sustainable AI IMChip's neuromorphic in-memory compute architecture — memristors that behave like synapses, 1000× performance gains at a fraction of current energy use. Ruben Hamming-Green, Co-Founder at IMChip VOLT: Making the Netherlands an AI maker, not an AI taker Han de Groot pitches VOLT’s AI Gigafactory Rotterdam, highlighting the urgent need for sovereign European compute and the opportunity for the Netherlands to become a producer of compute Han de Groot, CEO@VOLT, Infra for AI. NL-EU AI-Gigafactory Initiator 18:40  Panel — building the stack: constraints, trade-offs, and what comes next How constraints shape innovation, efficiency and scale. From the chip layer - Axelera's €250M+ journey - to the cloud layer - Nebius's Finland factory and $4B raise and the neocloud thesis - to the application layer, deploying AI at scale across 100+ portfolio companies. Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Chief Executive Officer/ Co-Founder ​- Axelera AI Danila Shtan, CTO Nebius Euro Beinat, Global Head AI / EVP Prosus and Naspers About the speakers Danila Shtan, CTO of Nebius, one of Europe’s leading neoclouds. Nebius is building a full-stack platform for AI developers and companies, from data and model training to production deployment. Nvidia recently decided to invest $2 billion, and Meta just signed $27 billion AI cloud deal with Nebius. Shtan is the technical mind previously responsible for the development of Yandex's cloud and AI infrastructures. Euro Beinat serves as the Global Head for AI and Data Science at Prosus, a leading global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world. He leads a team of AI professionals, providing strategic guidance and solutions to the companies in the Prosus group. Fabrizio Del Maffeo is CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI, the semiconductor scale-up building high-performance, energy-efficient AI chips for edge and inference applications. A seasoned leader in AI and hardware, he previously headed AI at Bitfury Group and led AAEON Europe (ASUS Group), and now steers Axelera’s rapid growth with a team drawn from leading global tech companies. Under his leadership, Axelera AI has emerged as one of Europe’s most ambitious AI hardware players—recently securing over $250 million in funding, the largest round for a European AI semiconductor company to date, bringing total capital raised to more than $450 million. Han de Groot is CEO of VOLT, a Dutch AI infrastructure company building large-scale “AI factories” that integrate data centers, GPU compute, and cloud platforms into sovereign, full-stack environments for Europe. He is the initiator of AI Gigafactory.NL, a multi-billion-euro effort to establish one of Europe’s flagship AI compute hubs in Rotterdam, aimed at securing digital sovereignty and reducing dependence on US and Chinese infrastructure. Ruben Hamming-Green is co-founder and Head of R&D at IMChip, a Groningen-based deeptech startup developing next-generation, energy-efficient AI chips inspired by the human brain. With a PhD in neuromorphic materials and devices from the University of Groningen, he operates at the intersection of materials science, semiconductor engineering, and AI hardware, working to rethink how computing systems process and store information fundamentally. Sebastiaan (‘Seb’) Vaessen is Head of Strategy at Prosus / Naspers Group, one of the largest tech investors in the world. As Group Head of Strategy, Seb has responsibility for global portfolio strategy, identifying new investment opportunities, corporate development, and special projects. ​Monique van Dusseldorp is a curator/moderator of tech events and part of the AI House team. NETWORK FRIENDS OF AI HOUSE ALWAYS BE CURIOUS - An unmissable newsletter on the how and wow of science and technology with a special focus on the chip industry, as published by Sander Hofman. WOMEN IN AI - Women in AI is empowers, supports, and elevates women in the field of artificial intelligence. A global organisation where women from diverse backgrounds can find opportunities, share insights, and lead communities. ​AMSTERDAM AI - a local network that connects knowledge institutions, companies, and public organisations to work together on impactful projects in the domains of Health & Care, Society, and the Service Sector. AI House Amsterdam ​AI House Amsterdam is a hub for artificial intelligence created by Prosus. With world-class technical events, the AI House offers free AI training and workshops, collaborations between engineers and academia, elite hackathons, meetup events, investor-founder events, residency programs for top AI experts, a moonshot project studio, and more. ​About Prosus ​Prosus is the power behind the world’s leading lifestyle ecommerce brands, across Europe, India, and Latin America, unlocking an AI-first world for our 2 billion customers. ​The Prosus technology ecosystem spans food delivery, payments, classifieds, travel, events, and mobility. Our integrated approach enhances user engagement and creates the foundation for unprecedented AI capabilities through proprietary data and cross-service intelligence. ​Address and contact information ​AI House is located on the third floor of the Symphony building, Mahlerplein 5, Amsterdam. ​Questions? events@aihouse.nl