Welcome to the AI Infrastructure Leadership Summit!
Welcome attendees! We're thrilled to have you in Barcelona.
8–10 September 2026 | Hotel Arts Barcelona
HOTEL WIFI ACCESS: Rafay_Summit (network name), password: Rafay2026 Main Point of Contact: Maria Gallegos, Rafay Systems, email: maria@rafay.co | phone: +1 650-773-7387
Kick off the Summit overlooking the Mediterranean — connect with fellow AI infrastructure leaders, NVIDIA, and ecosystem partners.
08:00–09:00
Networking
Coffee, Registration & Networking
09:00–09:15
Opening
Applying Portfolio Theory to AI Factories
Haseeb Budhani — Co-Founder & CEO, Rafay
Capital is flooding into AI infrastructure, but raw capacity is not a business. Haseeb sets the core idea of the summit and folds in the four directions Rafay is building toward and why. The session frames where margin lives and how operators move from selling GPU time to selling outcomes.
09:15–09:35
Keynote
The NVIDIA AI Factory Playbook: Where NVIDIA Invests, Where Partners Build, and Why Customers Win
Warren Barkley — VP Product, DSX, NVIDIA
Warren Barkley opens Rafay's customer event with NVIDIA's strategy for sovereign and neocloud AI infrastructure: the thinking behind what NVIDIA expects from the ecosystem, and what that means for operators and enterprises buying into this stack today.
09:35–10:15
Keynote
What It Actually Takes to Go From Silicon to a Service Customers Will Pay For
Ashin Uday — Product Lead, Yotta
Ashin Uday joins Haseeb Budhani and Warren Barkley for a conversation on what it actually takes to go from silicon to a service customers will pay for.
10:15–11:15
Session
AI Neocloud Economics: Winning on Margin and Enterprise Readiness
David Wood — Senior Managing Director, Global Lead, Sovereign AI, Accenture
AI demand is growing rapidly, and building a sustainable neocloud business depends on both GPU access and the economics of operating them. This session connects the economics of AI infrastructure with the capabilities enterprises expect from their providers, examining the margin math behind the neocloud model — GPU utilization, pricing, and the balance between training and inference workloads — alongside what enterprises are actually asking for. Drawing on advisory work across sovereign and neocloud programs worldwide, David Wood identifies where operators most often fall short and what it takes to address those shortcomings.
11:15–11:45
Networking
Executive Networking
11:45–12:45
Lunch
Lunch
12:45–13:15
Session
Lessons Learned From Deploying 35+ Multi-Tenant GPU Clouds and AI Factories
Alex Saroyan — Co-Founder & CEO, Netris
Drawing on lessons from 35+ production GPU cloud and AI factory deployments, Netris CEO Alex Saroyan explores what it takes to operate complex AI networks at scale. He'll cover the challenges of managing multiple networking layers, enabling hardware-enforced multi-tenancy, and moving beyond DIY automation to build more scalable, secure, and repeatable AI infrastructure.
13:15–13:45
Panel
The Business of Neocloud Economics
Karin Roeschlein — CFO, Rafay (Moderator) Nick Jacobs, Investor, AI Mills · Elvir Stupar, Cisco Global Investment Fund · Chirag Bhagat, Parinita Inc · Chester Reid, CFO, Era4
A financial panel on the economics of the AI business: GPU-as-a-service margins versus token-based AI services, and how utilization, pricing, and mix drive ROI on a major infrastructure bet. Finance and operations leaders from leading neoclouds compare where the returns are coming from today and how they plan to grow margins from here.
13:45–14:45
Networking
Executive Networking
14:45–15:15
Session
From Token Maxing to Outcome Maxing: Building Hybrid AI Infrastructure for Enterprise Value
Noam Rosen — Director, Enterprise AI Europe & META, Lenovo
AI leaders are no longer asking how many tokens they can process, but what outcomes they can create with the right balance of cost, control, and trust. As agentic AI drives dramatically larger workloads, enterprises will need hybrid infrastructure spanning frontier cloud, private AI, hosted environments, and the edge. This session explores why hybrid AI is becoming the default enterprise model, and why intelligent control planes that route workloads across environments may become the winning layer.
15:15–15:45
Session
The Next AI Factory: Where Scale, Sovereignty and Economics Converge
Rod Evans — EMEA VP, Supercomputing & AI Cloud Infrastructure, NVIDIA
The next wave of AI will be about turning capacity into AI factories that can serve enterprises, governments, and entire regions at scale. Drawing on NVIDIA's work across supercomputing, cloud partners, and the broader AI ecosystem, Rod Evans explores how the AI infrastructure market is evolving from centralized GPU capacity toward distributed, sovereign, and service-driven AI factories — and what separates infrastructure that simply delivers compute from platforms capable of attracting workloads, improving utilization, and creating durable economic value.
16:15–16:45
Session
Full Fleet, Thin Margin: The Utilization Number Nobody Owns
Izhar Sharon — SVP AI Customer Advocacy, DDN
A fleet can be sold out, fully allocated, and still miss its margin. "Utilization" is three numbers, not one: what you sold, what got assigned to a job, and what the GPUs spent computing rather than waiting for data. Sales owns the first. Orchestration owns the second. The third has no owner and is capped at design time, months before the first customer. Izhar Sharon separates the three, names the workloads where a fast data tier adds margin and the ones where it takes margin away, and closes with five questions worth asking your own team before the next site is committed.
16:45–17:45
Networking
Executive Networking
17:45–17:55
Closing
Bringing It Home
Haseeb Budhani — Co-Founder & CEO, Rafay
Haseeb closes on the shared playbook behind building AI as a business and, for many, an act of sovereignty.
18:45–20:45
Dinner
Executive Dinner
08:30–09:00
Networking
Coffee & Networking
09:00–09:10
Opening
Meet Team Rafay
09:10–09:40
Session
The New Telco Opportunity: From Connectivity Provider to AI Infrastructure Provider
Franck Jonas — Head of Telco, France, NVIDIA
Telecom operators already own many of the ingredients needed for the AI era: facilities, power, networks, distributed infrastructure, enterprise relationships, and increasingly GPU capacity. Franck Jonas explores how those assets can evolve into a distributed AI infrastructure platform, and what telcos need to add to turn infrastructure advantage into AI services and revenue.
09:40–10:10
Keynote
From Design to First GPU-Hour Revenue, Faster
Simon Dumbleton — CTO Europe, World Wide Technology
The gap between an AI factory design and a running, revenue-generating system is measured in months, and every one of those months is GPU-hour revenue lost on infrastructure already paid for. This session covers how the right systems integrator takes an operator from design to deployed across the full stack, getting them to first GPU-hour revenue sooner. It pinpoints where deployment stalls, and how the best operators avoid it.
10:10–10:30
Networking
Executive Networking
10:30–11:00
Session
The Secure Foundation for Sovereign AI
Jon Evans — EMEA AI Specialist, Neoclouds & Enterprise GTM, Cisco
Secure and sovereign AI starts with a validated foundation. Cisco on the compute, fabric, and validated architectures that let operators serve regulated and sovereign demand.
11:00–11:30
Session
The Margins That Turned Doubt Into Scale
Karan Kirpalani — CPO, Neysa
Neysa's Karan Kirpalani on building a business that beat the market on margins when few believed it could, and the discipline that turned into real scale. A candid read on what superior unit economics look like and how they compound.
11:30–12:00
Networking
Executive Networking
12:00–13:00
Lunch
Lunch
13:00–13:30
Session
Optimizing Inference at Scale
Laura Morselli — NVIDIA
As operators scale from a single model to many, inference optimization becomes the key to margins. NVIDIA shares its perspective on the future of the token factory, exploring how to accelerate LLMs while driving down costs.
13:30–14:00
Session
Beyond the Build: What It Takes to Operate a Profitable NeoCloud
Matt McGuiness — Rafay
The distance between hardware and a production AI business is where operators lose time and money.
14:00–14:30
Session
Distributed Compute: Where AI Infrastructure Meets the Built Environment
Xeal
AI's growth is widely seen as capped by power. The real constraint is where that power sits. Data center demand is set to outpace new grid capacity through 2030, and inference needs to run close to users to perform. The solution to both already exists in the ground: distributed, permitted power behind EV charging infrastructure in dense urban locations, waiting to be utilized.
14:30–15:00
Customer Session
Building the Demand Side of Sovereign AI in Malaysia
Farul Mohd Ghazali — CTO, Aras Integrasi Sdn Bhd
Most sovereign AI conversations focus on supply — GPUs, datacentres, national clouds. This session flips the lens to demand: what does a government actually need before it can use the capacity being built for it?
15:00–15:30
Session
Dispatches From the Field: What Customers & Partners Are Telling Us
Mohan & Hemanth, Rafay
Rafay works across neocloud operators, enterprise buyers, and the partner ecosystem that connects them. Mohan and Hemanth share what that work is surfacing: which neocloud, telco, and enterprise requirements come up in nearly every deal, where operators consistently underestimate the effort, how monetization models are shifting from hourly GPU rental toward consumption-based pricing, and what partners are asking Rafay to own versus build with them.
15:30–15:40
Closing
Bringing It Home
Haseeb Budhani — Co-Founder & CEO, Rafay
Haseeb closes on the shared playbook behind building AI as a business and, for many, an act of sovereignty.
15:40–16:10
Networking
Executive Networking
Agenda subject to change. Times shown are local to Barcelona (CEST).
Meet the Speakers
Executives from Rafay, NVIDIA, and the AI infrastructure ecosystem share how operators turn GPU capacity into profitable, sovereign, and scalable AI businesses.
Hosted at the iconic Hotel Arts Barcelona, the summit combines strategic discussions with exceptional hospitality on Barcelona's Mediterranean waterfront.
Continue conversations over authentic Catalan cuisine, evening receptions overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and relaxed networking in one of Europe's most dynamic technology and innovation hubs.
HOTEL WIFI ACCESS: coming soon
Main Point of Contact: Maria Gallegos, Rafay Systems maria@rafay.co | +1 650-773-7387
