IDC & AMD Executive Dinner
Accelerating Innovation with Advanced Data Center Architectures
In collaboration with
Accelerating Innovation with Advanced Data Center Architectures
Across Europe, organizations are accelerating their digital transformation to keep pace with an increasingly digital economy – and digital infrastructure is moving from enabling back-office efficiency to becoming the business itself.
IDC’s 2025 EMEA Digital Infrastructure Survey shows that the most digitally advanced organizations are investing most strongly in IT infrastructure, and it pays off: 36% of Europe’s Digital Leaders grew revenue by more than 10%, versus just 8% of digital followers.
This shift is being accelerated by AI. Improving datacenter security and resilience is top of mind for IT leaders, while building out infrastructure for GenAI workloads has risen just as fast. Most European enterprises still prefer to build and run private IT, using public cloud to augment rather than replace it – so modern datacenter architectures must deliver new levels of performance and integration while remaining secure, resilient, sustainable, and cost-effective.
A peer-to-peer roundtable dinner
IDC’s invitation-only, complimentary, Executive Dinners are designed to be a small-scale, personal, and interactive gathering, with sufficient time for you to connect with like-minded industry peers. The structure of our event aims to be simple and effective – starting at 18:30 and ending at 22:30, with discussions being held over a three-course dinner and champagne reception.
This exclusive dinner offers a confidential setting for peer-to-peer exchange, bringing senior IT and business leaders together with experts from IDC and AMD to explore how advanced, AI-ready datacenter architecture is becoming the engine of competitive advantage, and how to modernize with confidence.
Key Topics for Discussion
Infrastructure modernization for performance and scale
Evolving enterprise infrastructure and advanced datacenter architectures to meet the demands of high-performance and AI-accelerated computing, scalability, and future growth.
Security, resilience, and regulatory readiness
Driving new levels of security and 24/7 availability as digital services become the business itself – and adapting to new requirements such as DORA.
Datacenter efficiency and sustainability
Optimizing architectures for the best balance of cost, performance, and energy efficiency as AI drives datacenter power and cooling demand sharply higher.
GPU-accelerated innovation in AI and analytics
Real-world use cases where accelerated computing enables breakthroughs in AI, analytics, and high-performance workloads across industries.
IDC Datapoint
Western Europe’s AI spending is spread across the full technology stack, but hardware infrastructure – servers, IaaS, and networking – still commands roughly $24 billion in 2026. AI ambitions ultimately rest on modernized datacenter architecture.
IDC forecasts Western European AI spending will more than double, from $52.5B in 2024 to $118.0B in 2026, intensifying demand for accelerated, energy-efficient infrastructure able to run these workloads at scale.
Speakers
Andrew Buss
Senior Research Director, Infrastructure
IDC Europe
Read bio
Andrew Buss
Andrew Buss is research director for IDC’s European Enterprise Infrastructure program. Based in London, he is responsible for driving IDC’s research covering present and future trends impacting servers, storage and networking and IT service delivery. Central to this is understanding how on-premises IT is evolving under the emergence of Open Source, Software-Defined Enterprise, multi-Cloud adoption and Cloud-native development practices, and how this will impact everything from the low level silicon underpinnings and system design, through to the design and integration of the different infrastructure components, up to the platform management and service delivery.
His research area focuses on understanding the convergence of different technologies and capabilities and how they need to integrate and work together to deliver efficient, effective and agile IT services from the datacenter or cloud right through to the end user. Andrew works with global, multinational and local vendors to understand the dynamics of business technology desires and needs, technology purchasing and investment, organizational and operations structures and customer mindsets and disconnects in order to help vendors effectively position and communicate their value and proposition.
Andrew is also an experienced public speaker, regularly keynoting at many industry conferences and panel sessions, as well as leading or participating in webinars, customer and partner events.
Previously at IDC, Andrew was Consulting Director in the European Consulting practice, where he lead many successful customer projects covering a wide range of outcomes, including custom intelligence and strategic planning such as market sizing and competitive analysis, as well as customer engagement and lead generation with a particular focus on identifying the spread of IT best practice and the associated success factors.
Prior to joining IDC in 2013, he spent over a decade as an industry and channels analyst leading global research services covering smartphones, PCs, printers, servers, storage, networking and security. Before this, he spent a number of years consulting with a wide variety of businesses implementing IT service management capabilities which provided an in-depth and diverse foundation across the entire spectrum of IT service delivery.
Event Sessions
One Day Event 10:00 pm
Summary of discussions and key takeaways
One Day Event 6:50 pm
IDC & AMD Welcome Address
Agenda
IDC & AMD Executive Dinner
One Day Event
Champagne Reception
Guest arrival with welcome drinks and networking
IDC & AMD Welcome Address
Andrew Buss
Senior Research Director, Infrastructure, IDC Europe
Delegate Introductions
Starter Courses: First Discussion Topic
Main Course: Second Discussion Topic
Dessert: Third Discussion Topic
Summary of discussions and key takeaways
Andrew Buss
Senior Research Director, Infrastructure, IDC Europe
Thank you for tonight
Host Partner
AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.