What Alexander Kucherenko is watching at CloudFest

Every industry has its gathering places. For the hosting and domains community, CloudFest (23–26 March, Germany) is one of them.

Part conference, part reunion, and part reality check, CloudFest is where operators, platform builders, and infrastructure providers come together to compare notes on where the market is heading next. The real value often happens between the sessions — in the hallway conversations, the technical debates and the occasional late-night industry storytelling.

For Alexander Kucherenko, Vertical Business Development Manager, the event comes at an interesting moment. As Ilkari begins expanding its cloud and hosting presence in the European market, CloudFest offers an opportunity to listen closely to how the ecosystem is evolving and where new opportunities may be emerging.

Looking at this year’s agenda, three themes stand out to Alexander:

AI is forcing a serious conversation about infrastructure sustainability.

As AI workloads push compute density to new heights, the industry is confronting the realities of power consumption and cooling. Sessions on energy efficiency and liquid cooling technologies suggest the focus is shifting from ambition to practical solutions for managing the physical demands of AI infrastructure.

Sovereignty is becoming central to cloud conversations in Europe.

Across the programme, discussions around sovereign and trusted cloud environments reflect growing concern about jurisdiction, governance and control over data. For operators entering the European market, sovereignty is quickly becoming part of how infrastructure is designed rather than simply a policy discussion.

AI-ready infrastructure is beginning to take shape.

Talks exploring specialised processors, AI-driven platform engineering and next-generation hosting architectures point to a broader shift: infrastructure is starting to evolve specifically for AI-native workloads rather than simply adapting existing cloud models.

Taken together, these signals suggest a larger direction for the industry — the emergence of sovereign AI infrastructure that is energy-efficient and secure by design.

Of course, CloudFest has always been about more than the sessions themselves. For Kucherenko, it is also a chance to reconnect with long-time colleagues from earlier chapters of the industry and catch up face-to-face after months of video calls.

And, as any CloudFest regular will tell you, no visit to the Black Forest is complete without taking time to enjoy a few authentic Bavarian sausages along the way.

Sometimes the best insights come with good conversation — and good food.

Curious about sovereign cloud and the future of hosting infrastructure in Europe? Connect with Alexander to continue the conversation.