Agenda

Many organisations are still operating infrastructure designed for a pre-AI world – not for sustained, high-density, intelligent workloads.

AI is now forcing a shift. Compute demand is rising, architectures are being redesigned, and decisions about where workloads run are becoming strategic.

ADAPT’s local research shows this clearly: a new infrastructure investment cycle is underway, with growing pressure on capacity, cost, and operating models.

We kick off Cloud & Infrastructure Edge with Australia’s infrastructure leaders to navigate this shift – rebalancing cloud, scaling AI-ready platforms, and securing the foundations for AI at scale.

ADAPT’s Research and Advisory team reveal the latest data-driven insights from senior Cloud and Infrastructure leaders across Australia, representing organisations responsible for a significant share of national economic activity.

Drawing on aggregated pre-event survey data, this session benchmarks how organisations are responding to AI-driven infrastructure demand — and where the next wave of enterprise compute will be deployed.

Key insights include:

– Where the next wave of compute will sit: cloud, hybrid, colocation, or private infrastructure
– The extent to which AI is driving infrastructure redesign and new investment cycles
– Where AI workloads are being deployed and how GPU strategies are evolving
– The key constraints to scaling infrastructure: power, capacity, integration, and cost
– How AI readiness varies across organisations and where gaps remain
– The impact of sovereignty and data residency on AI and infrastructure decisions

Helping you benchmark your position and validate your strategy, ADAPT distils the most important signals from the community — highlighting what’s changing, what’s working, and where leaders are focusing next.

Unprecedented AI investment doubled global capacity to 376GW. Dean Nelson unpacks the 2026 iMasons report to navigate Australia’s 30GW pipeline and five critical delivery pressures.

– Navigating the Five Ps crisis: balancing power, pushback, people, planet, and policy.
– Reconciling exponential compute demand with the social accord needed to unlock infrastructure.
– Designing grid-responsive AI data centres capable of pausing workloads to balance supply.
– Will the shift from costly LLMs to secure edge SLMs drive repatriation?
– Charting the next steps for Australia to secure its sovereign AI future.

Flying in from California, Dean Nelson is a respected digital infrastructure pioneer and Founder and Chairman of Infrastructure Masons, the independent industry group for leaders building and operating the Digital Age. He has led more than $10 billion in infrastructure projects across nine countries and holds four US patents. Dean previously led Uber Compute, powering the infrastructure behind Uber’s global platforms, and earlier served as Vice President of Global Foundation Services at eBay, enabling scale and commerce. A former Sun Microsystems executive, award-winning innovator and data centre trailblazer, Dean continues to shape the future of sustainable, mission-critical technology.

Simon Davies unpacks CBA’s historic AWS core migration, revealing how moving systemic national liquidity unlocked the foundation for 55 million daily AI decisions.

– What it took to move 40% of national liquidity safely.
– How unlocking 90% of data powers 55 million daily AI decisions.
– Evolving cloud foundations to support enterprise-wide generative AI and agentic workloads.
– What’s next?

As agentic and GenAI token usage multiplies energy consumption, discover how to confidently scale secure, modular, and sustainable hybrid IT infrastructure.
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– Offset massive energy spikes from agentic and GenAI workloads using sustainable designs.
– Deploy modular, AI-ready infrastructure to scale capacity without compromising grid resilience.
– Secure sensitive workloads while deploying generative tools to optimise carbon emissions.