Sagi Paz, head at AMD Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2026 Powerlist.
Sagi Paz has built AMD Ventures into a systematic, scaled venture function for Advanced Micro Devices, giving the company a repeatable model for identifying, investing in and partnering with startups shaping the future of AI, compute infrastructure and next-generation silicon systems.
Paz joined AMD in 2022 through the company’s acquisition of Xilinx, where he had led Xilinx Ventures. At the time, AMD had limited venture investing activity, so Paz was not inheriting a mature CVC operation. He was building one from the ground up. His mandate was to create a disciplined venture programme that could support AMD’s strategic priorities, strengthen its startup ecosystem and identify emerging companies aligned with the company’s long-term technology roadmap.
Under Paz’s leadership, AMD Ventures has grown into a more structured and scaled capability. The group invests from early-stage startups through growth-stage and select later-stage companies, focusing on businesses that can benefit from AMD technology while also extending AMD’s relevance across the AI stack. AMD Ventures now spans more than 50 active portfolio companies and has invested more than $1bn of capital in AI, with focus areas across AI models, platforms, vertical AI, AI cloud, silicon technologies and interconnects.
Recent activity has highlighted the breadth of that approach, with AMD Ventures investing across the AI stack from frontier applications to core infrastructure. The group invested in World Labs, the spatial intelligence company developing frontier world models for interactive 3D environments, and backed Runway, the generative AI company building creative tools, video models and world simulation technology for creators and enterprises.
At the infrastructure layer, AMD Ventures co-led TensorWave’s $100m financing, supporting the company’s AMD-powered AI cloud platform and large-scale GPU deployment. The same infrastructure thesis is reflected in Ayar Labs, an AMD Ventures portfolio company that raised $500m to accelerate technologies addressing one of AI’s most important scaling challenges: moving data efficiently across increasingly complex systems.
Those investments reflect a broader evolution in AMD’s approach to corporate venturing. AMD Ventures is not a passive balance-sheet activity or a collection of one-off strategic bets. It is a structured venture programme designed to help AMD identify technical adjacencies early, support emerging workloads, deepen relationships with AI-native companies and strengthen the relevance of AMD platforms across the next generation of compute-intensive markets.
The portfolio makes that structured approach visible. On one side are frontier model, platform and application companies such as World Labs, Runway, Cohere, Hugging Face, xAI, Liquid AI and Upstage. On the other are infrastructure and silicon-adjacent companies such as TensorWave, Vultr, Ayar Labs, Celestial AI and Eliyan. Together, they give AMD Ventures exposure across the full AI stack, from models and applications to cloud infrastructure, interconnects and advanced system architecture.
The strategy is also beginning to produce tangible outcomes. Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial AI in February 2026 gave AMD Ventures a strong financial outcome and underscored the value of backing companies addressing major infrastructure challenges in AI. It also demonstrated how AMD Ventures’ investment strategy can combine strategic relevance with financial upside.
As AMD expands its role in AI infrastructure under CEO Lisa Su, Paz has positioned AMD Ventures as an increasingly institutionalised part of the company’s growth strategy. The venture function gives AMD a disciplined way to engage with emerging technology leaders, support ecosystem development and stay close to the companies and categories likely to define the next phase of AI and high-performance computing.
The GCV Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.
Here’s a snapshot of their recent deals:
