Inside the AI Factory: How DDN is Powering the Next Wave of Enterprise AI

AI ROI is now the real test. I got a chance to chat Joe Corvaia, SVP Sales at DDN at NVIDIA GTC in Washington. This one is for CEOs and exec teams who are being pushed to “do AI” but still can’t show a return.

We started with a simple question. Why are some companies actually getting ROI from AI while others are still stuck in pilots. Joe was very direct on what separates the ones who are scaling from the ones who are still presenting slides.

We talked about infrastructure as a board-level strategy. Not just “buy more GPUs,” but “are you using the GPUs you already bought.” Joe walked through how data infrastructure and data flow have to be part of the conversation in the boardroom, not just in IT.

We got into AI factories and the new DDN Enterprise AI HyperPOD. Built with Supermicro and accelerated by NVIDIA, HyperPOD is designed to take teams from first deployment to serious scale. The idea is you should be able to stand up production AI without rebuilding the stack every time you grow the workload.

Joe also broke down why platforms like HyperPOD, and GPU-aware networking and acceleration like NVIDIA BlueField 4, are about more than performance. They are about efficiency. Max GPU utilization. No idle spend. Faster time to value. This matters not just for big tech, but for regulated industries and sovereign AI programs that need capability and control.

We closed on one topic that every CEO is thinking about right now. How do you future proof AI investments. Joe shared the one principle leaders should follow so they are not buying hardware for headlines, but building an AI foundation that still makes financial sense five years out.

If you own AI strategy, budget, or delivery, watch this.

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