HPE’s AI Factory Is the New Baseline

AI pilots are easy. Enterprise AI at scale is the hard part.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Craig Dillman of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Earl Dodd of World Wide Technology break down how enterprises are moving from experimentation to production-grade artificial intelligence—and why AI Factories are becoming the backbone of modern enterprise AI.

Rooted in decades of supercomputing expertise, AI Factories turn artificial intelligence into a repeatable, governed production system—balancing performance, cost, sovereignty, and security while staying flexible enough to absorb fast-moving models and agentic systems.

With inference workloads exploding and AI agents generating massive volumes of data, they warn that 2026 may be the year the enterprise AI data bottleneck hits, exposing infrastructure that wasn’t built for continuous AI production.

The takeaway is clear: the future of enterprise AI belongs not to endless pilots, but to organizations that industrialize artificial intelligence.

Support for this episode provided by: Juniper Networks

More about this week's guests:

Earl J. Dodd is Global HPC Business Practice Leader at World Wide Technology, where he advises enterprises and governments on HPC, HPDA, and supercomputing strategy. He drives technology enablement, business development, and ESG-aligned outcomes, helping organizations achieve ROI through secure, ultra-scale architectures spanning HPC, cloud, and extreme data environments. With 40+ years of experience, Earl is a trusted industry leader and frequent speaker at global conferences.

Earl's top pick: The Workflow Revolution: How HPE Private Cloud AI Transforms Enterprise AI from Isolated Workloads to Integrated Value Chains

Craig Dillman is an NVIDIA Alliance Technology Solutions Manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he works at the intersection of advanced computing platforms and enterprise adoption. He partners with customers and ecosystem stakeholders to align NVIDIA technologies with real-world business and technical requirements, helping organizations design, deploy, and scale modern AI and accelerated computing solutions within enterprise environments.

Craig's top pick: How AI Agents Are Transforming IT Ops

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.