YC S26 Demo Day Preview: Floating Data Centers, Diamond Chips, and 20,000 Tokens/sec Hardwired AI
bosmeny · x · 2026-09-09
Ahead of YC S26 Demo Day, some of the batch's wildest ideas are out:
- Atomarine: floating data centers on barges, seawater-cooled, aiming to run on nuclear ships — grids can't expand fast enough, the ocean can.
- Kara Labs: betting diamond goes from cooling chip to being the chip.
- Parasma: training living human brain cells to compute; founder got there teaching neurons to play Doom.
- Lamb Labs: hard-coding an entire AI model into silicon, claiming 20,000+ tokens/sec in some configs.
- Locke: AI for navigating government, $800K ARR in eight weeks, reportedly on track for $1M by Demo Day.
- Axelrod: AI-run hotels whose agents click through legacy front-desk software — the lack of APIs is the moat.
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