At MWC 2025, FNTV’s Steve Saunders sat down with Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer at Ampere Computing, to discuss how the company is shaping the future of cloud-native computing. With a strong focus on energy efficiency and sustainability, Ampere is delivering high-performance processors optimized for cloud, telco, and edge applications. Wittich shared how Ampere’s differentiated approach is addressing the growing demand for AI workloads without drastically increasing power consumption—a critical challenge for modern data centers and telecom infrastructure.
Ampere’s innovation isn’t happening in isolation. Wittich highlighted the company’s robust ecosystem of partners, including Canonical, SUSE, Fujitsu, and SynaXG, all working together to drive real-world deployments. With AI reshaping compute needs, Ampere’s agility and engineering expertise are accelerating the adoption of energy-efficient, high-performance processing. Want to know how Ampere is tackling the biggest power constraints in AI? Click play to watch the full conversation.
Steve Saunders:
Welcome back to FNTV at MWC '25. I'm Steve Saunders, and I'm excited to welcome Jeff Wittich, the Chief Product Officer at Ampere Computing, a leader in innovative cloud and edge computing solutions. With a focus on energy efficiency and sustainability, Ampere is at the forefront of developing products that meet the growing demand for cloud-native environments. Jeff, you are operating in an exciting but crowded market, how does Ampere differentiate itself from its competition?
Jeff Wittich:
Yeah, great question. We've been building processors for cloud environments for the last six or seven years, and high performance, but also efficient processors has really been our focus in that space. And so increasingly, those same types of high performance power efficiency needs are relevant not just in big cloud data centers, but also in telco and at the edge.
Steve Saunders:
Okay. Great answer. Cloud-native solutions are growing in popularity, which is good for you. How are you modifying your product roadmap to accommodate those demands?
Jeff Wittich:
Yeah. Well, the good thing is that as the cloud becomes ubiquitous, those same types of environments, the same types of software stacks and the same performance needs for applications like AI, as that becomes prevalent in telco and edge applications, the same things that we did in the cloud help us in this space as well. From a hardware perspective, the good thing is the things that we did with our Ampere Altra and AmpereOne processors, those all still hold in the telco space. We've really focused on working with partners and ensuring the whole software stack as well as the other hardware vendors that are needed, who are building entire systems and other pieces of hardware to make sure all that comes together in an Ampere's solution for telco.
Steve Saunders:
So you have an ecosystem of partners that you've developed? Can you mention any?
Jeff Wittich:
I can, yeah. We do have an ecosystem of partners, and so we've been doing a lot of work with folks like Canonical and SUSE on the software side. We've also been working with SynaXG, Fujitsu, OREX building out full solutions, and that's allowing us to get these into trials and make them available for commercial POCs right now.
Steve Saunders:
That's fantastic.
Jeff Wittich:
Yeah.
Steve Saunders:
Ecosystem is one of the big buzzwords at this event, but sustainability is another one. Can you tell us about any initiatives you have around energy efficiency and sustainability, how's that going?
Jeff Wittich:
It's going really great. That's really at the heart of it. Obviously, you have to have a high performance processor for it to play in this space, but the real big differentiator is that we're delivering all that performance at very, very low power. Power has become really the biggest limiter to the continued growth of compute. And again, that's true out in big data centers, but increasingly it's true out at the edge and in telco as well, because there, you're trying to fit a lot of performance, many times more than you needed a couple of years ago because of AI in a really small power envelope. We're able to uniquely deliver that combination of performance and power that people need for workloads like AI.
Steve Saunders:
Make it live for me. Is it an order of magnitude more power that you need at the edge if you're running AI?
Jeff Wittich:
Well, it can be. If you use traditional solutions, it could be an order of magnitude more power that you need in order to run these workloads. Our goal is to deliver up that extra performance, but not increase the power envelope because people aren't going to go and rip out their existing infrastructure. And frankly, it's not a sustainable approach to consume an order of magnitude more power, so our goal is to deliver all that performance and not require additional power.
Steve Saunders:
What's the split in the cost between the OpEx of the whole thing, between buying the equipment and the power for the edge of the network? Is power a really significant expense for operators?
Jeff Wittich:
It is. I mean, that is a big factor here, although what's interesting is that a lot of times the equation isn't necessarily about total cost of ownership in the OpEx. It matters if you can save on OpEx, but increasingly, it's actually just that there isn't enough available power in order to increase the compute using traditional techniques so it's not really even about being able to pay for-
Steve Saunders:
It's just can you do it.
Jeff Wittich:
It's just can you do it, and so increasingly, that's become the big constraint. It's just power capacity and power delivery versus the cost of power.
Steve Saunders:
Well, you, you're a former Intel alum. You were responsible for Xeon, which is a big job, now you're seeing the industry from a smaller but powerful company. 1500 employees is a very different experience for you, what are the advantages of being inside that smaller organization?
Jeff Wittich:
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big advantages is that we can be very agile and we can respond when we see these types of big changes over the last year or two. Obviously, AI has started to change everything, and so we've been able to really, really quickly adapt and expand out into other markets. A couple of years ago, telco and edge weren't as big of a focus for us because there just wasn't a need for as much performance the way we were delivering it. But with the rise of AI, we were able to quickly expand, add the ecosystem of partners, and bring really compelling solutions into all these spaces. I love the agility of Ampere. We've got a really innovative team of engineers, and it's been a ton of fun.
Steve Saunders:
You look happy.
Jeff Wittich:
I am, yeah.
Steve Saunders:
Yeah, congratulations on all the success so far. You're definitely in a good spot. Jeff Wittich, Ampere, thanks so much for joining FNTV.
Jeff Wittich:
Perfect, thank you very much.
Steve Saunders:
Thank you.