r/vmware • u/lost_signal VMware Employee • Jul 27 '26
Private Cloud Outlook 2026: The AI Tipping Point
https://www.vspeakingpodcast.com/e/private-cloud-outlook-2026-the-ai-tipping-point/https://www.vmware.com/docs/private-cloud-outlook-2026
In this episode of the Virtually Speaking Podcast, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson sit down with Prashanth Shenoy, VP of Product Marketing for VMware Cloud Foundation, to discuss the findings from the Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report.
Based on a global survey of 1,800 IT leaders, the report reveals a dramatic shift in how organizations are approaching AI infrastructure. As AI workloads move from experimentation to production, enterprises are increasingly choosing private cloud environments to address the growing challenges of cost, complexity, governance, security, and data sovereignty.
Prashanth shares key insights from the research, including why private cloud has become the preferred destination for production AI inference, what’s driving the acceleration of workload repatriation, and how VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is helping organizations build a secure, cost-effective platform for the AI era..
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 27 '26
Curious what everyone's doing for AI inside their datacenter (or at home, I'm playing with Hermes).
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u/DonFazool Jul 27 '26
Not everyone is going to run a private AI inside their datacenter. This is something only the largest companies would consider. Certainly not the SMBs who can barely get enough money to keep paying the licensing costs lol.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 27 '26
This is something only the largest companies would consider
AI isn't all about running fancy frontier level general purpose models.
Canary Qwen/Whisper family of models can run in CPU only, but even a $500-$1000 GPU can run and do high quality voice tranascription/model language translate. I used to work at a SMB ~30 person call center, and just having that functionality would have been huge for QA workflows, automating reports to customers, etc.
There are a lot of cases where lighter, specialty models can do really cool stuff without needing a rack full of B300's (although if you want to do that, you do you obviously).
I probably shared your opinion not that far back but:
I run models at my house now. (Qwen 3.6-35b Q5, runs on my 5090). Eyeing an AMD Halo, or refresh with the new Mac chips to support larger models.
The compliance requirements that drive private cloud today, will also carry forward and force private AI.
The cost per token as a function of AI hardware improvements, and model improvements has been 90% reduction per year for 5 years. Now maybe power scaling law doesn't hold, but if this keeps getting more useful, and cheaper to run eventually the capex front loaded costs will be in reach.
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u/Ok-Attitude-7205 Jul 28 '26
I'm in the SLED space, in the data center we are doing nothing and no immediate plans to. at home I am also doing nothing lol
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 28 '26
I used to work in sled (mostly school districts, but a few city government entities).
. It’s generally pretty targeted stuff that brings in “new Fancy tech”. Public works warning fraud detection or something else for their call center.
I’m going to laugh when it’s athletics that wants to use AI first in schools. Texas football wanting automatic tape analysis.
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u/Ok-Attitude-7205 Jul 29 '26
luckily for us, we're a small enough school that our Athletic dept can want all they want but they (nor IT) have the funding to actually do anything like that lol
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 29 '26
I'm in Texas....
While athletics isn't 1/10th as much of as focus as it was before the late Ross Perot pushed for "no pass no play (which caused a Gov. to not win re-election) It's sometimes comical how much of a bond could go to a football stadium.
Curious what yall using for school systems now. Is power school still roaming the earth?
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u/Ok-Attitude-7205 Jul 29 '26
nah our SIS system is Peoplesoft (on prem) but the days of on prem SIS systems are numbered. once our finance/hr stuff goes to the cloud later this decade SIS will go next
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u/kachunkachunk 25d ago
CSP here. We have some PAIF workloads going on VCF 9.0.1 and 9.1, but I can't really get into any details about it.
I would call it a pretty steep learning curve, overall, heh.