The Great Chasm: Closing The Production Gap With Sovereign, Sustainable Private Cloud AI – Six Five On The Road

How can sovereign, sustainable private cloud AI models help enterprises bridge the production gap in AI adoption?

‍

From HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, host David Nicholson is joined by Hewlett Packard Enterprise SVP of WW Hybrid Cloud Solutions Sales Alexia Clements, Carbon3.ai Chief Strategy Officer Sana Khareghani, and Mick McNeil, Chief Business Officer at Carbon3.ai, for a conversation on how sovereign, sustainable private cloud AI is enabling enterprises to achieve measurable business outcomes while addressing integration, governance, and operational challenges.

‍

Key Takeaways Include:

‍

🔹Talks of a UK “National AI Grid”: The role this would play for solutions in delivering sovereignty, sustainability, and predictability to UK enterprises.

‍

🔹Applied Intelligence Meets Hyperscale: How HPE and Carbon3.ai’s partnership uniquely addresses AI integration and governance obstacles that hinder production readiness.

‍

🔹Real-World Applications: Customer-centric examples showcasing tangible outcomes in time-to-value, cost reduction, and carbon impact.

‍

🔹Choosing a Strategy: Considerations for enterprises comparing public cloud, on-premises, and sovereign private cloud deployment models

‍

Learn more at HPE.

‍

Watch the full video at sixfivemedia.com, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

‍

Or listen to the audio here:

‍Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

‍

David Nicholson:

Welcome back to HPE Discover 2025. We're here in Barcelona. I'm Dave Nicholson for Six FIve On The Road. And we're going to have a very, very interesting conversation with an organization out of the UK, Carbon 3 AI, along with the folks from HPE that they work with. We have Mick and Sana from Carbon 3 AI and Alexia from HPE. Welcome all.

‍

Alexia Clements:

Thank you for having us.

‍

David Nicholson:

All good here in Barcelona for everyone, yes? So far so good. Well, Sana, I wanted to start with you. Carbon 3 AI describes itself as the national grid for AI. What do you mean by that? What does that mean, national grid for AI?

‍

Sana Kharegani:

Well, thank you for asking that question. So we are delivering secure, affordable, high-performance compute to UK organizations that is built on owned land and powered by renewable energy. And that means that our customers are getting predictable costs and performance. And they're really able to build from the idea phase to full production without the complexity and the risks that come along with it.

‍

David Nicholson:

And Alexia, why does HPE care about Carbon 3 AI? What's the value proposition here?

‍

Alexia Clements:

Yeah, it's super simple. HPE, our ambition is really to help enterprise customers go from their AI ambition to their AI production. And we believe Carbon 3 AI is a wonderful way to go and drive customers. We're super excited that they're built all in the UK, they're driving sovereignty, and we think it's going to be a great partnership.

‍

David Nicholson:

So sovereignty is an important aspect of this. And Sana and Mick, talk to me more about that. How does Carbon 3 AI and sovereignty, how do those things kind of co-mingle?

‍

Sana Kharegani:

Well, if I start and I'll pass over to Mick. We are, you know, our solutions are really quite pragmatic, right? It is, we are bringing something new to the market. We own our land and our energy, and we are delivering better British infrastructure based on renewable energy. And it means that we've got more resilient ability to deliver production, and it's more affordable. And it is something that doesn't exist yet right now in that form.

‍

Mick McNeil:

Yeah, I think when you look at our target customer base in the enterprise, some of those industries are challenged with other options today, challenged with things like the US Cloud Act, Patriot Act, which brings question to where you can securely put your data on your workloads. And we think about AI, it's even more critical given the autonomous nature of the solutions we're bringing to market. When we think about how we show up to market, UK owned, UK operated by UK people for UK businesses. That's a very differentiated offer and it's resonated in regulated industries and UK government as examples.

‍

David Nicholson:

So Carbon 3 AI has UK covered. Is this something that we can expect HPE to sort of replicate around the globe in terms of relationships with entities that can deliver sovereignty?

‍

Alexia Clements:

Absolutely. So as we're in Europe, sovereignty is the buzz at the show. More and more customers are looking to have in-country solutions managed and operated by providers like Carbon 3 AI in-country. So that is becoming more and more important. And we're actually seeing that You know, as you know, we're seeing when we talk to customers that there's a little bit, there's a feeling that the hyperscalers, you know, that there's risk with the hyperscalers where it may not be in country. So yes, so our strategy is to partner with, you know, partners like Carbon3AI and really drive scale. Right now, everybody's trying to figure out, how do I drive real production of AI? And so we think having strong partners, where it's a turnkey solution with what we're doing with HPE Private Cloud AI, and strong partners, that's what we're going to need to really scale and help enterprise customers really find value in their use cases.

‍

David Nicholson:

On that subject of scale, Sana mentioned the idea of owning the land, owning access to power. There's a certain security associated with that. That's all well and good. Now you start scaling into thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of GPUs. A lot of folks are going to come to this conversation based upon their relationship with HPE. And so they put a certain amount of trust in you that as Carbon 3 AI scales, they're going to get the service that they expect. How do you manage through that scaling process?

‍

Alexia Clements:

Well, at the heart of it for us with HPE Private Cloud AI, it is an engineered, fully integrated solution. So what we do is we build it at the factory. We build it at the factory completely integrated and bring it over and then we install it in Carbon 3 AI data centers. And so for us, it's really like the value that we bring is that level of integration, that level of governance, that level of security. And what we're seeing with customers also is, you know, some of the hiccups that they're seeing when they're doing AI is the fact that it's putting all the pieces together. And that's what's hard, right? You're integrating all the software, you're integrating security, you're driving governance. And so the value that our partnership is bringing is that turnkey solution for customers.

‍

David Nicholson:

Okay, so the infrastructure that's going in is an HPE stack.

‍

Alexia Clements:

That's correct.

‍

David Nicholson:

That people can depend upon. Well, this is all theoretical until we get to the point where actual customers are using actual things. Mick, do you have any examples? You don't have to share names if they're under NDA or proprietary, but can you give us some examples of what you're seeing?

‍

Mick McNeil:

I'd like to quickly jump back to the previous question. No, no, Mick, yeah, no, please, please. Because I think this is really important. We're a business that was named four months ago. We've got a tremendous amount of assets across the UK, 55 locations, top to bottom, left to right, generate energy on a lot of those locations. The addressable market opportunity for us is huge. An organization that can build the technical capability maturity to move at that pace, it's impossible to move at the pace that we have moved at without HPE. To be clear, HPE is a partner, not just in providing the hardware, deploying it, designing it, managing it as well, but securing those first couple of customer outcomes, which makes us feel very happy, of course, but equally our customers look at the team as a safe pair of hands. And those supercomputers, they're pretty tricky to design and deploy. They take time, which is why we've chosen private cloud AI to get into market at pace, 40 days from PO to deployment, and another 10 days to have customers on that platform. That could not have happened with any other provider, or even six months ago with even HPE. So it's a real solid innovation that supports enterprise moving at pace to value in AI.

‍

Alexia Clements:

Absolutely. And so that's a key point that he just said. So that time to value is so critical. So from the time that we inked the deal to getting private cloud AI stood up and running, 40 days. And then another 10 days to bring on their customers onto that. So that's what we're seeing, that customers, when they're do-it-yourself, that's where it's taking a really long time. So that's, I think, the key value prop in that turnkey engineer solution.

‍

David Nicholson:

And you said 55 locations? Correct. So okay, so this isn't just a warehouse in Manchester. Because you say 55 locations, and I went to school in the UK for a while, and I'm like, are some of them hanging off the edge into the sea? Is there room for that many? So this is serious stuff. So you have a serious partner here.

‍

Alexia Clements:

And that's spot on. That's what we're seeing with customers. You say, OK, I want to do AI. Here's my use case that I want to go implement. And then you start to bring in all of the other pieces of the organization. around governance, around security, around data, and it's getting super complicated, right? And so people get spun up in, you know, in all of the different things around they need to do around integrating a solution. So the value of our partnership is it is there, ready to go, and we've taken, we've removed that noise for customers. So you can show the thing.

‍

David Nicholson:

Yeah, no, that's important to be able to show people something. Alexi, I teach the AI program at Wharton, and my students are CIOs and CTOs. So pretend you're talking to them for a moment. They're trying to sort through this whole question of, first of all, they want to figure out how to save money and make money with AI. But a big question is, where do I do this? How do I sort through my options here? You've got hyperscale cloud providers. You have the whole spectrum of hybrid cloud offerings from HPE. Now you toss in this concept of sovereign AI. How should people think about this? How do they go down that kind of decision path?

‍

Alexia Clements:

Yeah, well, I think they first need to think about, you know, what are the use cases that they want to drive? You know, what do they have the use cases? Have they done total cost of ownership and ROI on those use cases? That's typically what we're coaching customers on is where you know, what's the most the hair on fire, you know, use case that you have? And how are you going to go and drive real outcomes for that use case. But typically what we do within HPE is we sit down with customers and understand, you know, what are they looking at in terms of their data, you know, how is their, where is their data need to stay, you know, in country, on-prem, do they need to have it managed, you know, in the country, so like that whole sovereign aspect of it. How are they looking at growth? Have they tested the use cases, right? Because we have a lot of customers that we see they're testing a use case, whether it be in the public cloud. But when you're really going to drive it at scale, they realize that the costs are prohibited. And you will have additional costs like egress charges and retrieval fees and things like that in the public cloud. So I think it's really having a very thoughtful plan on what are your use cases, how are you going, how are you, like the security data and the governance, have you answered those questions? And then that really makes, I think, a good decision on where you're placing, where you're going to place that.

‍

David Nicholson:

So I've got kind of a final question. And of course, if you have other comments, jump in. But my final question is, from any of your perspectives, are you seeing an actual move towards what we talked about in the past as repatriation? And those of us in the infrastructure business talked about that in an almost hopeful way. It's like if we said it enough, maybe it would happen one day. and maybe everything wouldn't run away to the hyperscale cloud providers. But it feels like, start with you Alexia, but if you have perspective on this, Sana and Mick, it feels like there's a very real gravity associated with people's data in this regard. People are concerned, sometimes irrationally, sometimes rationally, about the importance, the sovereignty, if you will, of their data. Is that driving more of a real hybrid cloud conversation where people are taking a serious second look at like, you know what, maybe I should be on HPE infrastructure in a Carbon 3 AI data center, maybe not the warehouse in Manchester, but one of the other 50, 54. There's nothing wrong with that. Any thoughts? Am I off base there? No. Is that a real thing?

‍

Alexia Clements:

Even just here talking to customers and partners this week, it is a conversation that we're having almost in every meeting. We're hearing from customers that, number one, I think they went into the cloud and moved as much as they possibly could into the cloud. And now they're realizing that they are very much in a hybrid environment. Things that couldn't move to the cloud are still on-prem, and then they've got their public cloud. but they're realizing costs, security, sovereignty, the data. And we are seeing more and more customers look at bringing certain workloads back on-prem. So it is like hybrid cloud is a real thing and how you manage that environment is what we've been talking about here at Discover Barcelona. But I would say yes. And then the other piece that I would say that has really almost like brought this up in the last few weeks is we've seen with some of the hyperscalers, some recent service delivery issues that have happened. And it happened, you know, across the globe. And so we're seeing more and more customers take a step back and think thoughtfully about that and that impact that has had in recent weeks in their business operations and think, hey, maybe let me take a second look at potentially bringing things on-prem.

‍

David Nicholson:

Obviously, we're not gleeful about any of that.

‍

Alexia Clements:

No, no.

‍

David Nicholson:

But I did detect a bit of a wry smile as you shared that.

‍

Alexia Clements:

I think executives thought everything was going to go to the public cloud. And I think we're seeing more and more a hybrid environment. And what we're seeing is customers want that cloud experience that they're getting with the hyperscalers. And that's really part of our hybrid cloud strategy around a hybrid cloud operating model. How do you give that same look and feel and management, but on-prem?

‍

Sana Kharegani:

I might just add two quick things on what Alexei has just said. I think what we're seeing is customers are becoming more thoughtful and more intelligent customers of these services. So they are now understanding their needs and matching a little bit more the challenges and the criticality of both the workloads and the data that they have, but the offerings that exist, right? And so becoming more intelligent and also that matching of challenges to solutions leads us in a space where we are moving away. Now, some people are calling that sovereignty, but I actually think this is just an evolution of the advancement as we adopt these technologies, more and more of us are understanding what we can and can't do and what our choices are. And when you've got choice, you make the best one for you.

‍

Mick McNeil:

Makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah, to wrap from my side, This partnership with HPE, founded on private cloud AI, infrastructure, enterprise grade, has allowed us to move extremely quickly for a new business, 40 days to deployment and 10 days to get our first couple of customers. to give an experience to customers that we couldn't have done before. And that experience is a production-ready use case for enterprises in two weeks. And that's based on the technology and innovations that HPE has delivered within the private cloud AI infrastructure. So it is the only choice for enterprises looking to move quickly at deploying infrastructure. The question becomes, where do you deploy it? And Carbon 3.AI is the answer for a lot of customers in the UK.

‍

David Nicholson:

Thanks to all of you. It's been a great conversation from us at Six Five on the Road here in Barcelona. Stay tuned for more content. We'll be right back. And by the way, if you miss this live, go ahead and turn on closed captioning for those of you in the UK who can't understand a word that I'm saying because of my accent. Closed captioning is a wonderful thing. We'll be right back.

‍

‍