Chris Lattner

Chris Lattner (born 1978) built the machinery modern software is compiled with. As a graduate student he created LLVM, the compiler infrastructure now underneath nearly every major language toolchain; at Apple he created Clang and then Swift, the language of the iPhone ecosystem. Stints leading Tesla’s Autopilot software, building the MLIR compiler framework on Google’s TensorFlow team, and running engineering at SiFive rounded out a résumé unmatched in systems programming.

Rebuilding the AI stack from the compiler up

Rather than debate AI, Lattner re-tooled his life around it. In 2022, frustrated by AI’s fragmented, Nvidia-locked infrastructure, he co-founded Modular with Tim Davis to unify AI’s compute layer, and in 2023 unveiled Mojo — a Python-superset language built for AI workloads that he boasts is “not just a little faster than Python. It’s faster than Rust.” His 2025 blog series “Democratizing AI Compute” became required reading on why CUDA’s monopoly holds AI back and how to break it.

The bet paid out. After a Series C valuing Modular at $1.6 billion, Qualcomm acquired the company in June 2026 as the centerpiece of an open-ecosystem challenge to CUDA in the data-center AI market. Lattner framed the deal as an acceleration of the founding mission: making AI development “more accessible and performant” across every kind of hardware.

Among programming-language creators — a cohort with plenty of AI skeptics like Rich Hickey — Lattner is the purest infrastructure bull: his position is not that AI is above criticism, but that its compute layer is “a hot mess” worth a decade of the best compiler engineering alive. As he puts it, working at that level of the stack gives you “power over compute.”