The Register is hosting a closed-door roundtable in Washington on 29 October, bringing together HPE and NVIDIA AI infrastructure leaders with technology and risk executives from regulated industries. The topic is data sovereignty in the AI era, and the format is deliberately off the record: Chatham House Rule, three questions, dinner, no slides. The organisers argue that the real obstacles to AI adoption are not model performance but where data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor will accept as evidence later.
HPE sends Thierry Pienaar, its CTO for HPC and AI worldwide sales, and NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, vice president for enterprise AI factory segment sales. Both are there to answer questions rather than present. The discussion is expected to cover which infrastructure options actually hold a data boundary, what each costs in capital, capability or elasticity, and whether those boundaries survive the move from pilot to production.
The event is aimed at decision-makers in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education who are making these choices now. Because the conversation is private, the organisers say it can address what a bank had to rebuild, what a hospital legal team refused to sign, and which sovereign option a buyer paid for and would not buy again. Government guests can pay their own share where ethics rules require it.