Israel's deep tech edge: Zack Fagan on AI's real bottleneck

ByJERUSALEM POST PODCASTSJULY 29, 2026 10:02Updated: JULY 29, 2026 10:47Watch this episode without interruptions.The story of AI is usually a story about processors. Zack Fagan, partner at Earth & Beyond Ventures, thinks that misses the point.Speaking with Anna Ahronheim on the Jerusalem Post's Defense & Tech podcast, he argues the real limits are physical and unglamorous: power delivery, heat dissipation, and data throughput.A GPU that handles a thousand data points is worth little if the wire feeding it moves a hundred at a time, and that, he says, is exactly where Israeli engineering can win.On defense, Fagan pushes back on a story Israelis like telling themselves, that only Israel produces battle-tested founders. The real advantage is proximity: the front, the primes and the startup all sit within driving distance, and a founder called up for reserves comes back with the next product already sketched.But "scarcity creates hyper-focus," he says, while American capital hunting the next Raytheon wants a platform, not a brilliant fix for one problem.The back half is the payoff. Why quantum may produce Israel's first category-defining deep tech company, how his fund separates a real business from a "science project," why the essential founder trait is talking like a PhD and an MBA in the same meeting, and the inconvenient truth about scaling AI that he answers in two words.Follow us on Google