The question you would ask HPE and NVIDIA if nobody was recording

The Register’s data sovereignty dinner in Washington puts HPE’s and NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure leads at one table, off the record, on 29 October.

There is a question about AI data sovereignty you would ask HPE or NVIDIA if nobody was recording. It is usually specific to your own workload and your own regulator, and it usually ends with whether the sovereign option on the slide survives contact with a procurement team.

On Thursday 29 October you can ask it. The Register is hosting a dinner in Washington with HPE and NVIDIA, our editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff in the chair, and nothing said on the record.

HPE sends Thierry Pienaar, HPE Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for HPC and AI Worldwide Sales. NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, Vice President for Enterprise AI Factory Segment Sales. They are there to take questions, and neither brings a deck. Both spend their working lives at the point where AI infrastructure gets bought, which is where sovereignty requirements are either met or quietly worked around, and the Chatham House Rule means they can say which.

That rule is what makes the evening worth the trip. What gets said at a table like this does not get said on a webinar: what a bank had to rebuild, for instance, or which sovereign cloud option somebody paid for and would not buy again. Everyone is there as a peer, the vendors included, and the chair steps in the moment anyone starts to sell.

The questions on the table are the practical ones: which options actually hold a boundary, what each costs in capital, capability or elasticity, and whether any of it still holds once the pilot is running for real.

It is one table, and places are limited. The seats are for technology, data and risk leaders in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education who are making these decisions now. Dinner runs from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at Fiola Mare. Places go by invitation.

Request one here.

Government and public sector guests: where your agency’s ethics rules require it, you can pay your own share and we will provide a receipt. Please say so when you request an invitation.