>Helmi wandered through the towering aisles of Santa’s gift warehouse, clipboard in hand. The shelves were packed with toys, gadgets, and games, all wrapped and ready—but something felt off. Workers rushed between rows, stacking and unstacking boxes, while others struggled with wrapping stations. It was chaotic, inefficient, and slow. Helmi sighed, watching a conveyor belt grind to a halt under the weight of mismatched packages. “Too much back and forth,” she muttered. “All this effort wasted just moving data—or, in this case, gifts.”

Helmi’s mind turned to another inefficiency she knew well: the digital AI systems Santa had been experimenting with. Like the warehouse, those systems suffered from the von Neumann Bottleneck, the fundamental limit of shuffling data between memory and processors. “So much energy wasted just to move information,” Helmi thought.

The solution, she realized, was to process data where it was—just like reorganizing the warehouse so that wrapping and packaging happened directly at the shelves. In AI, this meant analog in-memory processing, where computation happened right where data was stored, bypassing the bottleneck entirely. Helmi jotted down a note for Santa: A more efficient workshop and smarter AI—both start by working where the data lives.

With a grin, Helmi began reworking the warehouse layout in their notebook, dreaming of a smoother, faster system for both gifts and computation. “Efficiency is the greatest gift of all,” she mused.