By PATRICK VANDENAMEELE , President and CEO, imec The AI race is often framed as a race for bigger models, faster chips and larger data centers, but Patrick Vandenameele, president and CEO of imec, argues that framing is outdated. Expanding on his keynote at imec’s ITF USA at SEMICON West, he writes that the real bottleneck is scalability: moving, storing, cooling and powering intelligence as AI shifts to agentic systems and physical AI. Imec CEO Patrick Vandenameele delivers the opening keynote at ITF USA during SEMICON West. With agentic AI, inference becomes a memory and connectivity problem as much as a compute problem. Lithography alone won’t deliver the performance per watt AI needs; instead, the next Moore’s Law is becoming a system-level law that multiplies gains across logic, memory, fabric, architecture and algorithms. Vandenameele describes imec’s “CMOS 2.0” approach and cross-technology co-optimization (XTCO) for a design space of stacked logic, heterogeneous devices, silicon photonics and tighter compute-memory integration. No single company can solve this puzzle alone, he writes. Ecosystem orchestration, bringing foundries, IDMs, equipment suppliers, hyperscalers, algorithm labs and neoclouds together, has become one of the industry’s defining sources of competitive advantage. Click here to read the full article in the SEMICON West Show Daily. The post AI Will Not Scale Without Expanding Ecosystem Collaboration appeared first on Semiconductor Digest .