Why we’re organizing Europe’s Premier AI Conference

Let’s start with the exciting news: on November 17th, Scaleway is organizing ai-PULSE, a one-day technical conference dedicated to artificial intelligence innovation, research & implementation. Supported by industry leaders including NVIDIA & Ampere Computing, the event will bring together 1,000 engineers, technical leaders & industry analysts to hear from 50 speakers across 3 stages. Our first speakers include startup founders, semiconductor designers & researchers behind Llama 2, as the event will serve both as a leading technical conference showcasing the latest AI research as well as a forecast of where AI will take us in the coming year as seen through the perspective of operators with hands-on experience deploying AI projects.

In the morning, Scaleway will share some insights from our AI customers and we may have an announcement or two to share! The majority of the day will be dedicated to facilitating knowledge sharing & conversations between AI innovators and technologists working across Europe’s digital economy. With the help of our partners, we’ll host invite-only workshops for companies at different stages of their AI maturity to accelerate their projects with hands-on support.

With that out of the way, I wanted to share a bit into why Scaleway is organizing ai-PULSE in Paris.

In the past year, AI has gone from an exciting industry trend to something that every engineer & board room are talking about. Artificial Intelligence achieved peak hype cycle (source: Gartner), AI startups raised more than $50 Billion in the year between June 2022-2023 (source: Crunchbase), and multiple government initiatives from the US, Europe & China made it clear that the race for AI was on. If they deliver on their promise, technologies like generative AI could deliver trillions of dollars in value to businesses by improving customer operations, marketing, sales and other functions (source: McKinsey).

Aside from being our headquarters, Paris was a natural fit for an artificial intelligence conference. Two different Paris-based seed stage startups — Poolside & Mistral — raised €100M or more to build foundational large language models. They join an ecosystem of early stage startups who are innovating around computer vision, speech-to-text, generative imagery & video, and machine learning — in short, decomposing each of the faculties of the human brain in an attempt to augment human capacity. The biggest tech companies in the world - Google, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Microsoft - all employ AI researchers in Paris. Paris already boasts AI unicorns like Dataiku & Algolia.

It was a fairly obvious move for Scaleway, Europe’s fastest-growing cloud provider, to organize a technical conference. We have 26,000 customers worldwide leveraging 9 data centers across 3 regions to power their digital businesses, many of whom are providing AI-centric services. The biggest blockers to AI projects moving from POC to production — cost, sustainability & data sovereignty — are three areas that Scaleway has consistently been ahead of the industry on. Running applications in production costs up to 75% less than on US cloud providers; we operate one of Europe’s most sustainable data centers right here in Paris; and we have been supporting European businesses looking to keep their data secure and local for over 20 years.

Scaleway has spent the last year working closely with the leading voices of AI in Paris across the public and private sector, and we feel we have not only a unique visibility into where AI is and is going, but also an obligation to facilitate a dialogue between those who are making breakthroughs in AI and those who seek to deploy AI projects.

If you’d like to attend, you can register your interest today. If you’d like to get involved in any way, we’d like to hear from you.