AI infrastructure conversations usually stay very technical. But my chat with , Santosh Erram, VP Partnerships DDN at Google Cloud Next '26 on The Ravit Show went in a different direction.

He kept bringing it back to one thing. Business value. Yes, compute is growing. Yes, GPUs are everywhere. But that is not the real bottleneck anymore. Data is. If you cannot move it fast, access it easily, and actually use it, your AI investment does not translate into outcomes.

What stood out was how fast things are moving. Their partnership with Google Cloud went from idea to launch in under six months. And now they are pushing things like 10 terabytes per second performance and hybrid tiering to meet real enterprise demands.

But the real proof was in the use cases.

- Salesforce pushing GPU utilization from around 48% to over 90%.

- Resemble AI driving cost savings.

- Sony Honda Mobility using it for autonomous driving.

Even financial firms bursting massive workloads into the cloud, hitting petabyte scale in a single day. This is not experimentation anymore. We are moving from AI pilots to real production. And the shift from training to inferencing is going to define the next phase. My biggest takeaway. AI is no longer limited by models. It is limited by how fast and how well you can work with your data.

#data #ai #ddn #infrastructure #googlecloudnext #api #google #theravitshow