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Charbel Ayoun

Smart City & Smart Spaces Director for EMEA at NVIDIA, focused on AI-driven smart cities and digital government transformation.

Aug 18, 2026

0:53
Can you tell us more about what that means and the role they might play in sovereign AI, which we're hearing so much about today?
1:01
Well, in a traditional context, data centers were meant to house data and store data.
1:07
Moving forward, with the word of generative AI, that's not going to be good enough.
1:12
Data centers are going to become what we call AI factory.
1:17
The same principle where a factory takes raw materials and produce products, AI factories is gonna be following the same path where the raw materials are all type of data, and they're gonna manufacture intelligence, insights, value, economic development, and that is the big transformation.
1:37
So now infrastructure and data center is not just a compute, It's a critical strategic infrastructure that ties directly to economic development and to foreign direct investment and to talent enablement and to startup community.
1:53
These factories combine the best of the best of AI in terms of networking, accelerated compute, because a traditional data center used to be a general purpose compute.
6:28
Could you talk a little bit more about that?
0:53
Can you tell us more about what that means and the role they might play in sovereign AI, which we're hearing so much about today?
1:01
Well, in a traditional context, data centers were meant to house data and store data.
1:07
Moving forward, with the word of generative AI, that's not going to be good enough.
1:12
Data centers are going to become what we call AI factory.
1:17
The same principle where a factory takes raw materials and produce products, AI factories is gonna be following the same path where the raw materials are all type of data, and they're gonna manufacture intelligence, insights, value, economic development, and that is the big transformation.
1:37
So now infrastructure and data center is not just a compute, It's a critical strategic infrastructure that ties directly to economic development and to foreign direct investment and to talent enablement and to startup community.
1:53
These factories combine the best of the best of AI in terms of networking, accelerated compute, because a traditional data center used to be a general purpose compute.
6:28
Could you talk a little bit more about that?

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