AI was a bit of a thing at CloudFest this year… are you surprised? A true “top 10 AI sessions” list is too subjective, so let’s do this instead.
As the #1 internet infrastructure festival in the world, CloudFest is obviously a B2B event, nobody comes here to learn what AI is. Those who build the internet come to find out what they can meaningfully do with AI in order to advance their businesses.
CSPs, MSPs, web hosters, corporate IT leaders, startups, open source developers, and web agencies all found highly-valuable insights to guide them through this profound period of change in the internet infrastructure industry. So I wouldn’t call these “the top 10 AI sessions at CloudFest”, since that ranking would depend on where you’re coming from as a Cloud or IT professional. Instead, think of this list as a snapshot of the scope covered during CloudFest—and what you can expect to learn at this festival.
Driving Value with AI
Ravi Rabheru, Head of EMEA AI Centre of Excellence at Intel, showcased real-world examples of how leading companies are leveraging Intel’s AI capabilities to drive innovation and achieve their business goals. Cloud service providers, enterprise IT leaders, and AI specialists within the internet infrastructure industry flocked to this keynote for valuable insights into the future of AI-driven Cloud transformation.
Scaling AI: How Data Centers are Evolving to Meet Tomorrow’s Demand
AI has already transformed how we process data, as well as how we build and power the infrastructure to support it. With increasing rack densities, new cooling technologies, and power constraints in major metro areas, data center operators must rethink their approach. This expert panel explored how next-generation data centers are balancing those hungry high-performance AI workloads with sustainability, regulatory considerations, and evolving investment trends.
The panelists:
Jerome Evans, CEO, firstcolo GmbH
Luke Armstrong, Technical Director, Black & White Engineering
Alexander Klein, CEO, KUA dc solutions GmbH
Boris Mayer, Head of Marketing, firstcolo GmbH
Building AI-Ready Skills for Tomorrow
Since our 2025 theme was The Human Edge, it made sense to look at how human workforces and leadership teams can evolve their own skillsets to work better with AI. Sara Rego, VP Commercial at Team Internet, shared how her organization provided AI training for all employees, fostering a culture of technological empowerment—while also delivering AI services to their customer-facing tools at just the right touchpoints.
Why Aren’t You Making Money from AI?
Okay, provocative session title! AI is set to add $2 trillion to the global cloud infrastructure market by 2030—but Ditlev Bredahl, CEO and Co-Founder of HostedAI, asserts that most service providers aren’t capitalizing on it. So, why not? On the CloudFest 2025 main stage, Bredahl broke down the market, the challenges, and—most importantly—the playbook for how CSPs and web hosters can tap into the massive demand for AI infrastructure. He also set the record for most slides in a CloudFest presentation deck: 190 slides in just 30 minutes!
I watched this presentation from the control desk, and missed around 40 of the slides because I had to, you know, blink. Good thing it’s available on demand, right?
Sustainability in Tech: Green AI and Cloud Solutions
When the latest AI explosion hit, it’s not like everyone just stopped caring about green data centers! AI is intimately connected with bare metal, so it always makes sense to explore the role of AI and Cloud technologies in promoting sustainability. This expert panel looked at eco-friendly practices, energy-efficient data centers, and how technology can help achieve environmental goals—all while considering the human impact.
The panelists:
Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer, Ampere Computing
Johann Strauss, Field CTO in the global AI Solutions Organization, Dell Technologies
William Bell, EVP of Products, phoenixNAP Global IT Services
State of the Global Cloud Market Report
This survey of participants in the world’s largest Cloud industry event sheds light on the broad perspectives of the leading internet infrastructure providers on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and core challenges of the Cloud in 2025. Brooke Edge, Consumer and Brand Research Partner at Open Eye, found that sentiment around AI had improved, but other issues such as data sovereignty have barged into the spotlight alongside artificial intelligence—showing once again that the biggest challenges facing the Cloud are often interrelated.
(CloudFest newsletter subscribers get a free copy of the latest State of the Cloud Report. So when you see that Subscribe button… hit it!)
Enterprise AI Integration
It’s possible to leverage AI solutions while actually reducing your infrastructure costs—and take advantage of emerging infrastructure technologies and strategies to develop more advanced AI tools. This panel of experts showed the crowd how to build and sell the most compelling IaaS solutions for AI as they showcased up-to-the-minute enterprise-grade tools.
The panelists:
Peter Groth, VP and GM – OEM and Service Providers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Ravi Rabheru, Head of EMEA AI Centre of Excellence, Intel
Johann Strauss, Field CTO in the global AI Solutions Organization, Dell Technologies
William Bell, EVP of Products, phoenixNAP Global IT Services
Confidential Computing: The Key to Unlocking Secure AI Insights in Healthcare
In the world of digital healthcare, de-risking data privacy concerns is key to unlocking the full potential of insights in the Cloud: AI needs vast amounts of data, and medical data is highly sensitive and protected by multiple layers of legislation and policy. Markus Leberecht, Principal Engineer and Member of the EMEA Chief Technology Office at Intel, discussed how confidential computing can revolutionize the handling of highly sensitive data, enabling secure Cloud processing for advanced AI-driven insights, ultimately re-defining the economic potential of confidential services for healthcare cloud applications in the age of AI.
You can watch this keynote on demand:
How to Address the Challenges of Sovereign and Sustainable AI
Regulations, energy costs, and awareness of climate change are changing industry standards and expectations. Large service providers are making big commitments to reduce their carbon footprint and energy usage whenever possible. Therefore tackling energy costs in the data center is a great place to focus on. The other big trend this year is Sovereign AI. Pierre Hoffer, EMEA Senior Director of Tech Sales HPC & AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, shared how HPE and NVIDIA teamed up to develop best practices to respond to these challenges—and how the Cloud community can benefit from that experience.
(As a side note, the idea of sovereign data and AI came up often at CloudFest 2025 as the geopolitical ground shifts beneath everyone’s feet. You can expect this to be a serious trend in the year ahead.)
Fireside Chat with Albert Einstein: Ethics, AI, and the Future Legacy of Humanity
Yes, we held a fireside chat with Albert Einstein, reimagined as a digital ghost in his office at Princeton University in the 1950s! The subject of the conversation was how modern technology—AI, cloud computing, and digital transformation—might shape future generations. We then discussed the process of bringing this session to life (including the odd glitch) with 1SP Agency, the team that helped us bring this experience to life. The overall purpose of this session was to show the creative possibilities of engaging with agentic AI.
Explore the Many Sides of AI at CloudFest
As you can see, artificial intelligence cannot be handled in a single “This is how to use AI” session. It must be approached from many different angles, which requires different types of expertise. If you want to see GenAI output trends, check Instagram and TikTok. For actionable business intelligence for making AI work for your company in a meaningful, sustainable, and profitable way, you have to come to CloudFest!
