Scaling Global AI Infrastructure | Kevin Cochrane, Vultr | RAISE Summit 2026

Speaker Context & Background

• The speaker recently completed a "seven marathons on seven continents in seven days" ultra-running challenge, finishing at the South Pole on a blue ice runway and currently flying from the North Pole to the event venue.
• The speaker contrasts the lack of polar bears at the South Pole with the safety risks at the North Pole, where armed security is required due to polar bears.
• The speaker serves as a representative for Vulture, an AI infrastructure specialist with a 10-year operating history.

Vulture Infrastructure Capabilities & Metrics

• Vulture provides a full cloud compute platform accelerated by NVIDIA and AMD GPUs across 33 global data center regions.
• The company recently launched its ninth European region in Milan during Milan AIWeek in May.
• Vulture is the world's largest provisioner of both AMD and NVIDIA GPU infrastructure for a fully accelerated compute stack.
• The company sponsors approximately 250 hackathons globally to identify and support enterprise innovators.

Market Trends & Strategic Outlook

• The speaker defines the current era as the dawn of a new 30-year "super cycle" of compute innovation, following two previous 30-year cycles (1963–1993: mainframes to client-server; 1993–2023: web/cloud to Kubernetes).
• We are currently at the "plateau of productivity" within the Gartner hype cycle, moving out of the "trough of disillusionment" toward real enterprise outcomes in agentic AI.
• The speaker predicts the final epoch of this 30-year super cycle will be quantum computing.
• The strategic shift is moving from centralized training clusters to decentralized, distributed inference clusters optimized for power efficiency and price-to-performance.

Enterprise Application Use Cases

• A hypothetical use case with Marriott International illustrates how agentic AI can double guest spend by proactively offering personalized services (e.g., food orders, Uber pre-booking) based on real-time data and travel context.
• The goal is to rebuild existing web applications into "AI-native architectures" that integrate clienteling, reservation, and in-room tablet experiences.
• Successful deployment requires separating GPU clusters (for model execution) from dedicated CPU clusters (for data pipelines, RAG, and orchestration).

New Product & Partnership Announcements

• Vulture AI Factory: A complete, single-click, API-driven AI infrastructure stack launching with SUSE, capable of orchestrating CPU and GPU workloads, security, and compliance for sovereign cloud operations in Europe.
• NVIDIA Integration: The full NVIDIA Enterprise software suite is now pre-integrated with Dell hardware and NetApp data operations within the Vulture stack.
• AMD Integration: The AI factory stack is also available on AMD GPU clusters with optional Vast data storage and Supermicro hardware.
• Voltron Retriever: Vulture released an open-source retrieval model with an 8–12x smaller footprint than competitors; the "Flash" version runs on mobile edge devices (e.g., iPhones) and ranks #1 on industry leaderboards.

Hackathon Winners & Recognition

• Milan AIWeek Winner: Leveraging agentic AI to power clinical trials.
• Ray's Summit Winner 2: Using agentic AI to power telco operations.
• Ray's Summit Winner 3: Using agentic AI to generate real estate investor decks in 60 seconds.
• Ray's Summit Winner 1: A proprietary solution involving agentic AI (specific details withheld, available at the Vulture booth).

Technical Architecture Requirements

• Infrastructure must be automated, on-demand, and scalable via CI/CD pipelines without manual human intervention (avoiding "snowflake" provisioning).
• The architecture supports global resiliency with multi-zone failover and load balancing across regions.
• The system integrates with existing hyperscaler services (Amazon, Google) and on-premise data centers to enable hybrid multi-cloud and sovereign cloud strategies.