2026 Outlook with William Wang of ChipAgents.ai

William Wang is a world-leading expert in artificial intelligence, specializing in generative AI and large language models. As the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Alpha Design AI, he brings a wealth of experience from academia and industry, having previously shipped Amazon Q at Amazon AWS Bedrock

A Mellichamp Chair Professor of AI at UCSB, William has been recognized with prestigious honors such as the IEEE Laplace Award, BCS Karen Spärck Jones Award, NSF CAREER Award, IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award.

William has published over 250+ articles at premier AI venues and widely cited in top academic conferences and media outlets such as VentureBeat, Wired, Fortune, and SemiWiki.com. William is at the forefront of AI innovation, driving the next generation of AI-powered semiconductor design and verification.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.

I’m William Wang, founder and CEO of ChipAgents.ai. I’m also a professor of AI at UC Santa Barbara. ChipAgents builds an agentic AI platform for semiconductor design and verification, helping RTL, DV, and CAD teams accelerate spec-to-silicon workflows using AI agents that integrate directly into existing EDA environments.

What was the most exciting high point of 2025 for your company?

In 2025, we achieved large-scale production deployments with multiple tier-1 semiconductor companies and saw rapid expansion from pilot teams to hundreds of engineers at a single customer. The scale of real usage, measured in billions of tokens and daily active engineers, strongly validated product-market fit.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2025?

The biggest challenge was scaling from early adopters to enterprise-wide deployments while meeting strict security, infrastructure, and workflow integration requirements across very different semiconductor organizations.

How is your company’s work addressing this challenge?

We invested heavily in enterprise readiness, including different deployment environments, fine-grained access control, auditability, and deep integration with customers’ existing RTL, DV, and CAD toolchains, without forcing workflow changes.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2026 will be, and why?

The biggest growth area in 2026 will be AI-native verification, debug, and system-level reasoning. As designs grow more complex, verification productivity, not raw RTL coding, is becoming the primary bottleneck.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth?

ChipAgents focuses on multi-agent reasoning for root-cause analysis, coverage closure, testbench generation, and design-verification co-optimization. Our agents operate across code, waveforms, logs, and specs, not just text.

What conferences did you attend in 2025 and how was the traffic?

We attended major industry events including DAC, DVCon, and several private semiconductor and EDA executive summits. Traffic and engagement were very strong, with a noticeable increase in hands-on technical discussions rather than exploratory conversations. It’s great to see the industry embracing our new AI agents platform to be a force multiplier for their tapeout projects.

Will you participate in conferences going forward? Same or more?

Yes. We plan to participate in more conferences, with a stronger focus on targeted executive meetings, closed-door technical sessions, and customer-led use-case discussions rather than broad booth marketing.

How do customers normally engage with your company?

Customers typically start with a technical evaluation or pilot, followed by expansion into production teams. Engagement is highly collaborative, with close interaction between our engineering team and customer CAD, RTL, and DV groups.

Are you incorporating AI into your products?

Yes. AI is core to our product. ChipAgents is built around multi-agent systems designed specifically for semiconductor design and verification workflows.

Is AI affecting the way you develop your products?

Absolutely. We use AI internally for rapid prototyping, testing, and workflow optimization, and customer feedback from real production usage directly shapes how our agents evolve.

Additional comments?

AI in semiconductors is shifting from experimentation to mission-critical infrastructure. The winners will be platforms that integrate deeply, respect existing workflows, and deliver measurable productivity gains.

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