Oil and Chips: A Supply Chain Conundrum (Panel Discussion)

Oil and Chips: A Supply Chain Conundrum
📍 JJ Lake Business Center, 340 E Middlefield Rd, Mountain View, CA
🗓 Thursday, May 7, 2026
🕠 5:30 – 7:30 PM PT
💲 Free | In-person | Panel + Q&A

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Modern supply chains are highly optimized—but increasingly fragile.
Join the INFORMS SF Bay Area Chapter for a panel discussion examining how reliance on a small number of suppliers, regions, and chokepoints creates systemic risk. We’ll focus on oil and semiconductors as two critical examples shaping today’s global economy.

Topics will include:

• Geopolitical and infrastructure risks (e.g., energy transit routes, concentrated chip manufacturing)
• Single points of failure in global production networks
• Tradeoffs between efficiency, cost, and resilience
• How disruptions propagate across interconnected supply chains

The panel will also explore how Operations Research (OR) enables better decision-making—helping organizations model disruptions, identify bottlenecks, and design more resilient strategies for sourcing, inventory, and capacity planning.

🔹 Prof. Hillard Huntington (Stanford University) – Executive Director of the Energy Modeling Forum, with decades of experience advising governments and industry on energy markets, geopolitical risk, and supply resilience.
🔹 Gaurav Sharma (NVIDIA) – Senior Planner in Supply Chain working on semiconductor capacity planning across wafer, chip, and advanced packaging—bringing a real-world view of how chip supply chains operate under pressure.
🔹 Fitore Kelmendi (C3 AI, formerly BP) – Former refinery engineer with deep expertise in oil and gas operations, now focused on applying AI to improve decision-making across energy systems.

Parking at the venue is free and plentiful!

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Agenda
5:30 – 6:00 PM: Check-in & Refreshments (Food & Drinks)
6:00 – 7:00 PM: Panel Discussion
7:00 – 7:30 PM: Q&A + Wrap-up

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Ideal for professionals and students in supply chain, operations, analytics, and related fields, as well as anyone interested in building more resilient systems in an uncertain world.