Ex-Sandsoft CTO announces new AI start-up, Think, and says “games industry experience is the secret ingredient” to solving some of AI’s biggest problems
After 16 years of engineering and technical roles at PlayStation, EA and Meta, Ahmed AlSharif has pivoted away from the games industry, launching Think, a start-up with big plans for innovative new approaches to the current limits of AI hardware
After spending several months in stealth mode, games industry veteran Ahmed AlSharif today unveiled his new AI start-up, Think. The new company is focused on building a new generation of intelligent, efficient unified software and hardware AI infrastructure that’s significantly more efficient than current technologies. That means developing innovative solutions to some of the big performance bottlenecks, including cooling, power efficiency and GPU utilisation.
According to AlSharif, his experience problem-solving and wringing every last drop of performance out of hardware and software across his many games industry roles has been absolutely fundamental to his approach with Think and his pivot into AI more broadly.
“I’ve spent close to two decades as a software engineer and engineering leader, and the games industry has been optimising GPUs and extracting maximum performance from constrained hardware for over forty years. So in reality, my core discipline was to solve compute problems,” said AlSharif. “The rush to build datacentres and roll out AI platforms has led to shortages and fast-rising costs for memory and GPUs, so I thought, why not apply the same engineering philosophy I’ve learned from games to the AI infrastructure problem? Where AI companies are seeing a hardware procurement challenge, we saw a GPU efficiency challenge, and that’s what Think is focused on.”
AlSharif’s co-founder is Ammar Enaya, who has more than 30 years of experience leading sales teams at technology companies in the Middle East, including Cisco, HPE Aruba, and Vectra AI.
“With Think, we have a huge opportunity to work with companies that see the potential for AI, but are constrained by the rising cost of hardware, the dominance of a handful of cloud-based AI companies, and concerns around the security and sovereignty of their data and infrastructure. The number of positive conversations I’ve already had with companies in the region has shown us that the same infrastructure issues are affecting everyone, big or small,” said Enaya.
Think already has patents pending on several new products, which the company plans to unveil at LEAP, a show that’s become the biggest showcase for technology companies in the Middle East, and which takes place in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, on August 31 – September 3 this year. So far, the company has been bootstrapped by the two founders, but they are actively exploring an initial funding round to support the roll-out of the new products, having already signed several significant MOU’s.
