The energy behind the AI infrastructure market was in full bloom here in Paris this week, where 9,000 attendees packed into the Carrousel du Louvre to discuss enterprise AI adoption, AI coding tools, and the growing neocloud maket.
The hot topics of the day included enterprise AI adoption, token consumption, and energy. The event kicked off with a video keynote address by French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and a keynote discussion between startup investor Mark Cuban and Anton Osika, Co-Founder and CEO of Lovable, a platform that uses AI prompts to build applications and websites.
Macron made a pitch for France being a leader in AI, with its own well-known startups such as Mistral AI. But key to his address was the message that Europe needs its own AI infrastructure and innovation in a new world of geopolitical divisions and the need for data sovereignty.
Cuban said the explosion of AI tools is accelerating innovation and fueling a startup boom. But more importantly, he said, it’s enabling people to unleash creativity and create apps and translate ideas into code faster.
“Your biggest limitation is your time and your imagination,” said Cuban. “The number of startups is accelerating dramatically. As things change, there is more opportunity. France is becoming more entrepreneurial.”
Neocloud Infra Evolves
One takeaway is that a new cadre of clouds, which we commonly refer to as neoclouds and/or altclouds, is quickly evolving to provide a wider range of services to enterprises. They also serve some of the fastest growing AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cognition. These companies will evolve out of being more than GPU rental services to provide global infrastructure, applications services, and data privacy and security.
Representative companies here at RAISE included AI cloud and compute providers CoreWeave, Vultr, and IREN; infrastructure orchestration vendors such as Rafay, emma, and Netris; data management companies such as Backblaze, DDN and Bright Data; and enterprise AI coding and app tool providers such as Cognition and Lovable.
“The pattern is the customers want regular compute and AI in the neoclouds,“ Mohan Atreya, the Chief Product Officer of GPU management startup Rafay, told me. “They will evolve into mini hyperscalers.”
Neoclouds are building out GPU and cloud compute infrastructure at a massive rate, but they don’t necessarily have the software resources and expertise that large hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have.
Kevin Cochrane, Chief Marketing Officer of cloud provider Vultr, told attendees that the AI infrastructure has just embarked on a multi-decade cyle.
“Are we overhyped? We are just at the start of the journey,” said Cochrane. “The journey that we are on is a supercycle. It’s a 30-year era of innovation through the entire compute stack. We are just getting to the new age where enterpreis can deploy AI-native applications.”
Indeed, based on the crushing crowds here at RAISE, which is expected to double in size next year, may be true. The ecoystem is growing as oftware companies help neoclouds and altclouds such as CoreWeave, Nebius, Vultr, and IREN to manage and deploy GPUs and compute more easily will be in high demand.
“They [neoclouds] are moving up the stack to provide more value,” said Gleb Budman, CEO of cloud storage company Backblaze, describing the neocloud strategy. “Their customers want more than GPU rental.”
Backblaze is coming off a five-year, $335 million deal with CoreWeave to provide datas storage.
There are other challenges, such as automating GPU services at scale, which requires the capability to partition and provide multi-tenancy in GPU clouds, as well as security and data connectivity to other infrastructure. Rafay helps with this problem by providing GPU configuration and automation middleware. Netris, which we profiled recently, partners with Rafay and many neocloud customers to provide network orchestration and automation.
Emma, is another cloud orchestration company we met with. Based in Luxembourg, emma is providing infrastructure automation and orchestration from every layer of the cloud, from the physical to applications layer. “Neoclouds have to evolve from real estate to value add,” Dmitry Panenkov, Founder of emma, told me.
Data Sovereignty Scrutinized
One of the recurring debates here at the RAISE Summit was how enterprises handle their data in the AI world, and whether they will continue to use large frontier model LLMs from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic or build custom private infrastructure and leverage open-source AI models.
“For many enterprise organizations, they are starting to calculate the ROI. It has to come from revenue as well as cost savings,” said Barak Kaufman, Chief Strategy Officer with Wonderful, which provides a multi-model platform to help enterprises deploy operational AI. “Tokenmaxxing is definitely the wrong approach. You need to figure out in which situations you want to have an open-source model, but for certain use cases. The biggest execution gap is the change management.”
Ivan Burazin, Co-Founder and CEO of Daytona, a supplier of AI infrastructure, said there is a trend toward enterprises increasingly using open-source models.
“You take open-source models and do post-training to get state-of-the-art models for your use cases. If you are going out to these largest enterprises they have their own AI labs,” Burazin said.
“What I’m seeing in closed doors from enterprise CxOs is how to have model-agnostic architectures,” said Kaufman. “The answer is not to go all in on one model. There’s not a single enterprise that I’ve met anywhere that’s not thinking about how to avoid model lock-in.”
Jonathan Corbin, Founder and CEO and Founder of Maven AGI, which offers an AI agent-building platform, said there is a trend toward enterprises protecting proprietary data and not freely giving it to the large frontier LLMs. “They are concerned about that,” he said. “We are seeing more and more people moving to an on-prem deployment. I don’t want people accessing data without controlling that.”
The RAISE Summit provided a real-time view into how enterprises are adopting AI and AI infrastructure. This fast-growing show has already announced it will move to a new location at the Palais Royal in Paris next year, to accommodate the growing crowd size.
