RAISE Summit

CoreWeave @ RAISE 2025: Building the Next Generation of Cloud in Europe

Michael

CoreWeave announced a strategic all-stock acquisition of Core Scientific to secure 1.3 gigawatts of U.S. power capacity, a move designed to accelerate AI cluster deployment and eliminate intermediary costs. Following its rapid pivot from crypto to artificial intelligence, the company recently completed an innovative IPO and is aggressively expanding its European footprint with $2.2 billion in committed capital and plans to deploy next-generation Blackwell and Rubin Next architectures. This growth trajectory positions CoreWeave to address global power bottlenecks while advising the market that future consolidation will be driven primarily by talent migration rather than traditional mergers.

Wes Cummins, Founder & CEO of Applied Digital: Ellendale’s Purpose Built AI Factory in North Dakota

Wes Cummins

Applied Digital is expanding its high-power density data center operations by securing a 400-megawatt contract with CoreWeave to construct a North Dakota campus utilizing stranded wind energy and designed for AI workloads. The company transitioned from Bitcoin mining to Tier 3 semiconductor-grade infrastructure after spending $5 billion on this project to ensure "five nines" reliability and extreme cooling standards for hyperscalers. With approximately 3% ownership by NVIDIA, the firm is capitalizing on the shortage of available power sites in the U.S. heartland while planning future phases that will integrate gas assets and explore nuclear options like small modular reactors.

RAISE 2025: Building AI for Security-Minded Enterprises

A French math PhD turned AI leader leveraged their academic background to build the Llama family at Meta before joining Cohere to prioritize business traction and secure, localized enterprise solutions. The speaker details a strategy where data quality and strategic partnerships, such as those with Fujitsu and RBC, drive the development of models optimized for specific languages and industries rather than pursuing Artificial General Intelligence. By focusing on grounded generation and flexible hosting options, the organization ensures data sovereignty and verifiable outputs for regulated sectors while avoiding the inherent risks of trying to mimic human cognition.

RAISE 2025 : Fireside Chat with Amit Bendov, CEO & Co Founder of Gong

Amit Bendov, Brian Bauman, Amit Bhandav

Founded by Amit Bhandav to solve CRM data gaps, Gong.io leverages autonomous AI to capture sales communication and transform enterprise productivity from manual entry to instant, context-aware insights. Operating on a maturity scale between assisted and near-autonomous levels, the platform currently handles high-volume administrative tasks while preserving human judgment for high-liability decisions. As enterprise leaders demand integrated AI for revenue generation, Gong drives adoption by eliminating briefing bottlenecks for Fortune 500 clients while fostering a unique culture that prioritizes employee personal branding and deep client relationships.

Alex Laubscher, CTO of Windsurf: Engineering at the Speed of Change

Alex Laubscher, Dimitris Bontolos

Windsurf has transitioned from a basic coding tool to an AI agentic IDE, rapidly evolving to enable enterprises to write approximately 90% of their code while tackling complex legacy systems through advanced retrieval and memory capabilities. The platform supports this high-velocity adaptation by integrating design files, reducing project iteration times from months to days as seen with partners like Ferrovial, and targeting a 99% productivity increase in software engineering. To secure global enterprise adoption, the company recently established a Frankfurt data center to guarantee GDPR and FedRAMP compliance, ensuring data sovereignty for clients in sensitive sectors while preparing to scale from 100 to hundreds of large European organizations.

RAISE Summit 2025: The AI Evolution Open Source, Fast Inference, and the Agentic Revolution

Tony Kim, Thomas Wolf, Rodrigo Liang, Arjun Kharpal

The AI sector is rapidly pivoting from foundational model development to agentic inference and production, driven by a strategic race for full-stack superiority where proprietary models currently retain a six-to-twelve-month performance lead. Enterprises are increasingly adopting open-source alternatives to ensure data privacy and cost efficiency, prompting a hardware shift focused on energy-efficient inference rather than raw training power. While consumer assistants and automated SaaS applications are expected to mature within two years, the industry faces critical bottlenecks regarding gigawatt-scale energy demands and the potential for data security breaches.

Or Lenchner - CEO of BrightData : The Data Awakening Defining the Future of AI

Or Lenchner, Larissa Holzki

Bright Data, the world's largest web data collection infrastructure provider, successfully defended its scraping practices in high-profile lawsuits against Meta and X, establishing a legal precedent that defines public data as information freely accessible without login barriers. Serving as the primary data source for major AI labs, the company supplies over 40 billion daily website interactions for training Large Language Models while maintaining strict standards against filtering private or paywalled content. Looking ahead, Bright Data predicts a "dual internet" architecture emerging within six to twelve months that accommodates both human users and autonomous AI agents, eventually evolving into a robotics-focused era where these foundational data models enable complex physical automation.

RAISE Panel 2025: The AGI Ascent Climbing Toward Superhuman Intelligence

Chase Lockmiller, Ilya, Peter, Sarah, Biang, Dario

A diverse panel of industry leaders and researchers analyzed the trajectory of artificial general intelligence, identifying energy scarcity and data quality as primary constraints while debating the future of centralized versus decentralized model architectures. Discussion highlighted a strategic shift toward massive test-time compute and human-AI collaboration, contrasting fears of cognitive atrophy with the potential for AI to automate outcome-based tasks while preserving process-driven human uniqueness. Experts concluded that regulatory frameworks must evolve alongside technological speed, with the consensus that AGI remains a moving target defined by the symbiotic relationship between human creativity and machine capabilities.

Clara Chappaz - French Minister Delegate: Can France Overtake AI? Inside the French Vision

Clara Chappaz

Building on eight years of pro-business reforms and a strategic focus on nuclear-powered compute infrastructure, France has secured its position as a global fifth in AI capability while launching the "Dare AI" initiative to bridge the gap between scientific excellence and public adoption. This €109 billion investment supports frugal model development and open-source principles, aiming to train 15 million citizens and equip 125 SMEs across sectors like healthcare and agriculture to overcome current deployment barriers. With key players including Mistral AI and OVH Cloud driving the ecosystem, the government is positioning the nation to define the next 24 months of the AI race through inclusive talent acquisition and targeted sector-specific innovation.

Eastern European Dynamism: Rayscho Raychev & Delian Asparouhov on Space Tech & AI Innovation

Rayscho Raychev, Delian Asparouhov, Deleon Asparov, Raicho Raichev, Vyacheslav Tykhonovskyi

Deleon Asparov of Founders Fund and Endurosat CEO Raicho Raichev discuss how the Bulgarian space company scaled from bootstrapping to securing rapid venture capital while deploying over 60 satellites. Raichev highlights Endurosat's strategy of using AI to slash data costs and eliminate traditional mission control, contrasting the region's "survivalist" work culture and 10% flat tax against stagnant Western European economies. The panel concludes by predicting that Eastern Europe will lead a defense and technology renaissance driven by geopolitical necessity, aiming to reduce reliance on the United States and prevent the decoupling of critical industrial sectors.

Amit Zavery & Scott Thomas: Pace vs Panic. Governance vs Chaos. How Companies Can Survive the AI Era

Amit Zavery, Scott Thomas

ServiceNow addresses the critical tension between accelerating AI adoption and maintaining rigorous governance by launching an AI Control Tower to track and manage autonomous agents within a centralized asset framework. Parallel to this, the company evolved its acquisition strategy to target deep-domain leaders like Logic.ai, integrating their specialized IP to solve complex orchestration problems while demonstrating that internal AI deployment can generate substantial value without reducing headcount. By generating $325 million in value through a hybrid human-digital workforce and achieving high call deflection rates, ServiceNow positions its "no-layoff" approach as a counter-narrative to industry trends driven by fear and cost-cutting.

RAISE Summit 2025: AI Infrastructure. Compute is the New Oil

Roman Chermin, Youssef El Manssouri, Shaun O'Meara, Stephen Balaban, Chase Lochmiller, Dylan Patel

The AI infrastructure sector is undergoing a paradigm shift from CPU-centric multi-tenant models to dedicated, high-density GPU environments, prompting NeoCloud providers to leverage rapid deployment speeds and sovereign strategies to challenge hyperscaler dominance. Leaders such as Sorrenti and Nebius are vertically integrating from energy sourcing and data center construction to advanced software virtualization, aiming to address Europe's compute deficit and mitigate enterprise switching barriers through specialized physical infrastructure. While market projections indicate that future revenue will eventually consolidate around model builders and sovereign entities controlling Artificial General Intelligence, the immediate landscape remains defined by a struggle for agility against entrenched ecosystem lock-in.

Benoît Dageville @ RAISE 2025: Zero to IPO and Beyond. From Startup to Snowfall Building Snowflake

Benoît Dageville, Roxanne Varza

After founding Snowflake in 2012 to decouple data storage and compute, co-founders Benoit Dageville and Thierry Kremer steered the company to the most expensive software IPO in history while rejecting acquisition offers to maintain their independent vision. Today, the enterprise serves thousands of clients including OpenAI and Disney by abstracting infrastructure complexity, a strategy that enables users to reduce processing times from weeks to minutes. The platform now leverages AI to ingest unstructured data and democratize analytics, allowing non-technical employees to access enterprise-grade insights without deep SQL expertise.

Ori Goshen, Co-founder & Co-CEO of AI21 Labs: AI - All The Work!

Ori Goshen

AI21 co-founders Ori Goshen, Yoav Shoham, and Amnon Shashua launched Maestro, a model-agnostic platform designed to automate complex enterprise workflows by generating multiple execution plans and preventing compounding errors in multi-step tasks. Internal benchmarks demonstrate that integrating Maestro with existing foundation models significantly boosts accuracy and allows developers to control computational budgets while maintaining full visibility into agent reasoning. The company frames this technology within a "super productivity" strategy where automating routine tasks empowers humans to execute faster and solve underserved market problems rather than simply reducing headcount.

Alison Wagonfeld @ Google Cloud: Marketing in the AI Era

Alison Wagonfeld

Google Cloud marketing is pivoting from theoretical planning to active AI execution, targeting key challenges like staffing shortages and budget constraints through tools such as generative asset creation and the VO3 video model. This shift has redirected 75% of team focus toward strategic work while replacing expensive traditional production with self-service agents and real-time personalization features like location-aware digital billboards. As the industry enters a predicted "golden age of marketing," leaders are urged to embrace these transformative capabilities beyond simple workflow digitization to redefine customer interaction within the next two years.