2 days of cloud, AI-ready infrastructure & security, powered by great conversations
On 3–4 December, we were on the floor at Cloud Expo in Expo Houten, the Netherlands’ large tech gathering where cloud, data, AI and security meet face-to-face.
And wow—what a run.
Over the two days, more than 300 trade visitors dropped by our booth to see the AMD & GIGABYTE showcase, grab a coffee and talk through real-world projects, pain points, and “what’s next” for 2026 planning. The vibe stayed upbeat from the first espresso to the last closing chat, exactly the kind of show where you leave with a full notebook and a full pipeline.
Key event highlights:
- Non-stop booth traffic: steady flow of IT leaders, architects, partners, and curious builders, more than 300 visits and plenty of hands-on conversations.
- Live infrastructure talk (not just slides): we went deep on performance per watt, scaling AI workloads, and modernizing data center foundations.
- Hospitality that worked: coffee & snacks kept the daytime energy high; beers helped turn quick intros into longer, more meaningful discussions.
- Serious momentum: our sales team left with a healthy stack of follow-ups, projects to scope, demos to schedule, and partnerships to expand.
Key takeaways we heard again and again
- AI-ready doesn’t mean “rip and replace.” Customers want realistic upgrade paths: better compute density, faster storage, and more secure app delivery, without rewriting everything.
- Performance is only half the story. The other half is efficiency, manageability, and time-to-value, especially when budgets and energy constraints are tight.
- Security is shifting closer to apps and APIs. “Protect the perimeter” is no longer enough, teams want stronger, smarter protection where users actually interact.
- Partners win when solutions connect. The strongest conversations weren’t about single products. They were about how compute + storage + platforms + security fit together.
Vendor product highlights (the 4 stars of our booth):
AMD — EPYC™ 9005 Series Server CPUs
If you’re modernizing for AI-enabled workloads, virtualization, or cloud consolidation, AMD EPYC 9005 drew serious interest. The lineup scales up to 192 “Zen 5 / Zen 5c” cores and is built for performance, density, and efficiency, exactly what teams want when they’re trying to do more with less rack space.
Why visitors cared: higher core density, modern platform capabilities, and a clear path for data center refresh discussions.
GIGABYTE — GIGAPOD as a Service (AI Supercomputing Solution)
AI infrastructure isn’t just “buy servers.” It’s about designing an interconnected cluster that behaves like one cohesive system. GIGAPOD as a Service is built for that, helping create rack-scale GPU clusters with high-speed interconnects (think NVLink / Infinity Fabric) so AI workloads can actually fly.
Why visitors cared: faster time-to-cluster, less complexity, and an approach that’s purpose-built for serious AI ecosystems.
Micron — 7600 NVMe™ SSD
Storage conversations were spicy this year, and the Micron 7600 gave people a lot to talk about. It’s a PCIe Gen5 data center SSD designed for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, with headline performance up to 12GB/s sequential and 2.1M IOPS, plus the kind of consistency that matters when workloads are unpredictable.
Why visitors cared: real responsiveness for AI inference, HPC, and high-speed data pipelines, without sacrificing power efficiency.
A10 Networks — ThreatX Cloud Web App & API Protection
Apps and APIs are the front door to the business, so protection needs to be unified and fast to deploy. ThreatX by A10 Networks stood out for bringing key protections together (WAF, API, bot, and Layer 7 DDoS) and backing it with a managed SOC to reduce noise and false positives.
Why visitors cared: security teams want fewer tools to stitch together, and faster, more confident protection of modern application ecosystems.
See the highlights and let’s meet again at the next Cloud Expo
If you stopped by: thank you for the great conversations. If you didn’t: we’ve got plenty to show you, check out our photo gallery to catch the booth energy, the tech on display, and the people who made these two days such a success.
And if Cloud Expo is on your calendar again next year, we’d love to welcome you at our booth and continue the conversations that started in Houten.
