Stephen Balaban

Stephen Balaban is co-founder and CTO of Lambda, the AI compute company he started in 2012 when training neural nets still meant assembling your own GPU box. After years as CEO he moved into the CTO seat in 2026 as Lambda hired a new chief executive and leaned further into gigawatt-scale cloud ambitions.

Starting with GPU workstations

Balaban has described founding Lambda around training ConvNets on Nvidia hardware at a time when cloud GPUs were scarce and researchers often bought towers. The company grew from workstations and servers into a cloud aimed at AI labs and enterprises that want dense GPU capacity with a developer-friendly posture.

From CEO to CTO as Lambda scales

In public posts he has pointed to nearly a billion dollars in AI cloud revenue as evidence the early hardware bet compounded. In May 2026 Lambda named Michel Combes CEO while Balaban became CTO, keeping technology strategy and product vision with the founder who built the stack.