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.

In this episode of WebAssembly Unleashed, hosts Joel Moses, Oscar Spencer, and Matt Yacobucci are joined by DevCentral Community Evangelist, Jason Rahm, to discuss programmability in the data plane. Through Jason's insights and use cases as both a former F5 customer and a current DevCentral maintainer they dig into the lessons learned from F5's iRules that Wasm should take note of.

Tune in to understand the programmability pain points for non-developers, the benefits of the community feedback loop, what Wasm can do to be usable for non-devs, and why Wasm portability reduces tool sprawl across platforms.

Learn more about F5's iRules: https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/irules/

In this episode of WebAssembly Unleashed, hosts Joel Moses and Oscar Spencer kick things off with updates on the upcoming Wasm.IO conference in Barcelona and the latest buzz around WASI Preview 3 before diving into an in-depth conversation with guest Ralph Squillace on Microsoft's Wasm strategy.

Ralph shares his journey in open source, from the early adoption of Linux at Microsoft to the rise of containers and the growing impact of WebAssembly. The discussion dives into Microsoft’s strategic role in shaping the future of WebAssembly, the unique advantages it brings to cloud-native development, and the challenges and opportunities facing the technology today.

Whether you're curious about the evolution of containers, WebAssembly’s potential in big tech, or the balance between open standards and corporate innovation, this episode offers expert insights into WebAssembly’s transformative role in modern tech.