Short session examining how organisations are reconsidering AI deployment locations as the technology accelerates, exploring how edge-based AI is transforming cloud design, application performance, and data governance.
Article author
AI Inferencing Will Define 2026, and the Market's Wide Open
Summary
John Bradshaw, Field CTO Cloud EMEA at Akamai, explains why 2026 is shaping up to be the breakout year for AI inferencing — the process of putting trained models to work — and why the market remains wide open for challengers to hyperscaler dominance.
The article argues that as AI model training consolidates around a handful of hyperscalers, the inference layer — where models are actually run — remains fragmented and contestable. Latency, cost, and data sovereignty requirements are pushing inference workloads to the edge, creating a structural opportunity for distributed cloud providers.
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