DCD Connect Live: London 2026
Debate: Hybrid cloud in the AI era – Best practice or a model under pressure?
Debate: Hybrid cloud in the AI era – Best practice or a model under pressure?
Europe's workload landscape is shaped by sovereignty rules, national cloud frameworks, energy constraints and regulation. Hybrid is now the dominant operating model, but AI is forcing a rethink. Training demands scale, inference demands proximity, regulators demand localisation, and enterprises must balance cost, risk and performance. The real question is how hybrid evolves as workloads rise, specialised clouds emerge, and the cost of on-prem investment becomes harder to justify in a volatile market.
About the event
DCD Connect London brings the data centre and digital infrastructure community together for two days at the Business Design Centre, running alongside The Xcelerated Compute Show and the Investment Forum. John joins an open-session debate with cloud and infrastructure leaders from Alibaba Cloud, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Kyndryl on whether hybrid remains best practice in the AI era — covering sovereignty and localisation pressure, where training and inference workloads belong, and the risk profile of on-prem investment in a volatile market. Moderated by Dan Swinhoe, Editor in Chief at DCD.
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