WebAssembly is usually framed as an application runtime story, but at AppWorld 2026 in Las Vegas, WebAssembly Unleashed shifts the spotlight to a more urgent frontier: data. As AI architectures get hungrier and more distributed, performance and security constraints are moving closer to the data store itself. In this episode, Joel Moses and co-host Oscar Spencer explore why WebAssembly components could become the connective tissue between data-intensive AI systems and the storage infrastructure that feeds them.

They’re joined by Ugur Tigli, CTO of MinIO, to break down how modern AI workloads stress storage in very different ways, from throughput-heavy training and RAG pipelines to latency-sensitive inference. Ugur explains why keeping GPUs fed is now an economic necessity, how MinIO optimizes for saturating networks, and how techniques like erasure coding and SIMD offload help keep CPU and memory overhead low across diverse hardware targets.

If you’re trying to understand where WebAssembly fits beyond the browser and beyond app logic, this episode offers a practical view of Wasm as a data-adjacent execution layer for real-world AI.