Conference Presentation, Fireside Chat, Interview
From Megawatts to Gigawatts: Building the AI Factories | Lenovo x NVIDIA | RAISE Summit 2026
- Data center capacity is projected to double over the next three to five years, with approximately 20% of gigawatt-sized facilities currently under construction dedicated to AI.
- Strategic partnerships are framed as essential for scaling due to limited organizational capabilities, involving daily co-engineering efforts across hundreds of thousands of GPUs rather than quarterly reviews.
- Infrastructure requirements are shifting, with liquid cooling anticipated as a standard execution need and networking complexity exceeding simple server procurement.
- Deployment strategies for gigawatt-scale providers will follow four distinct stages: concept, building, deploying, and optimizing, with an emphasis on rapid delivery via manufacturing sites close to deployment locations.
- Key economic metrics include time to token for evaluating inference costs and time to insight, with significant productivity losses anticipated as deployment times increase.
- Geographic expansion will prioritize new builds in northern regions like Norway and Iceland while retrofitting existing sites in France, alongside a rise in sovereign operations in Germany, France, and the UK.
- Access to compute is expected to enable major enterprises to transform into AI companies, though GPUs remain unavailable in Europe with wait times of at least 12 months.
- Operational bottlenecks include uncontrollable delays in permitting and power access, which constrain deployment speeds despite sufficient global demand.
- Physical AI, including vehicles and humanoids, is identified as the next frontier where Europe can leverage its manufacturing and robotics advantages.
- A European economic transformation is contingent on acting on AI opportunities, utilizing vast domain data in healthcare and manufacturing to deploy autonomous agents.
- The partnership offers a single point of contact for quality, security, and speed, managing the complexity of environments with approximately three million cables.