You Build With AI. Here's How AI Builds the Chip Underneath It.

You call the API. The model runs. But somewhere beneath the cloud, a chip is doing the actual work. That chip fits over a billion transistors into the space of a pinhead. And every single one had to be placed and connected by engineers solving one of the hardest design problems in existence. Physical design is the discipline that turns logic descriptions into physical silicon. It is extraordinarily complex, deeply specialized, and almost never discussed on a developer stage. And right now, it is being transformed by AI automation. Drawing from hands-on work designing chips that power AR and AI devices, this talk covers how machine learning tools are changing physical design workflows: automating quality checks, predicting timing violations before they occur, and compressing weeks of manual engineering into hours. This is AI designing the hardware that runs itself. You will leave with a concrete understanding of how that works, where it delivers real leverage, and where it still falls short.