Corporate venture arm TDK Ventures chief Nicolas Sauvage is doubling down on the less glamorous side of artificial intelligence. The French executive, who launched the fund in 2019, has already steered $500 million into inference chips, specialized robots and emerging battery chemistries. His most visible win, Groq’s $6.9 billion‑valued inference processor, exemplifies a strategy that looks four years ahead to bottlenecks and backs founders already solving them. Sauvage now watches CPUs, Chinese “vibe manufacturing” and the quest for dexterous machines as the next sources of competitive advantage. Read more →