February 4th, 2025 | London, St Paul’s
In a recent panel discussion on AI infrastructure at State of Open Con 2025, industry expert and Stelia CCO Dan Scarbrough joined Amanda Brock (OpenUK), Robbie Jerrom (Red Hat), and Sam Johnston (Acumino) to highlight the mounting challenges enterprises face with data mobility and connectivity in the rapidly expanding AI computing sector.
The AI infrastructure market is experiencing unprecedented growth, with Nvidia deploying 350,000 GPUs across 100 data centers globally. However, enterprises looking to harness this computing power face significant obstacles in moving their data efficiently. 
“We’re in the dial-up modem phase of AI,” Scarbrough explained. “The internet wasn’t designed to handle the volumes of data that AI workloads require.” This connectivity bottleneck is creating real business problems. Data-intensive AI applications struggle with traditional 100 Gig network links that can’t adequately support the 137 terabit backplanes of modern GPU systems. Meanwhile, model builders and enterprises deploying AI often find themselves with disconnected infrastructure spread across multiple locations.
“Most organizations deploying GPUs aren’t optimizing for data mobility,” Scarbrough noted. “They’re building facilities next to power sources without considering how data gets transferred to and from these locations.”
The siloed nature of current deployments presents significant long-term concerns. Organizations with multiple AI infrastructure deployments across different regions find themselves with isolated compute resources that can’t efficiently share data or workloads. This fragmentation drives down utilization rates – many systems operate at just 40% capacity instead of the projected 80%.
As enterprises continue adopting AI technologies, addressing these data mobility challenges will be crucial for maximizing investment returns and enabling the next generation of AI applications that require seamless data movement across distributed computing resources.
Want to learn more about the AI infrastructure landscape? Watch the full panel discussion featuring Stelia CCO Dan Scarbrough and industry experts from Red Hat and the Open Source Alliance: AI Infrastructure and Data Centres
