Global AI ambitions keep colliding with the same wall: cloud infrastructure that can’t keep up with performance demands without compromising where data lives and who controls it.

As organizations look to roll out agentic applications, they require a foundation that is both compliant and performant. This infrastructure inflection point demands a scalable platform that balances open ecosystems with strict data sovereignty, according to Kevin Cochrane (pictured), chief marketing officer of Vultr LLC.

“We’re moving from the age of experimentation in AI to the age of implementation,” Cochrane said. “This is the time when enterprises are looking to roll out new AI-native applications, new AI and agentic AI services — and they’re looking to do that globally.”

Cochrane spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty at SUSECON 2026 for an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the strategic partnership between Vultr and SUSE and the evolution of sovereign cloud infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Scaling cloud infrastructure with performance and predictability

The market has historically been dominated by traditional hyperscalers, often leading to hidden costs and restricted innovation. SUSE and Vultr are addressing this gap, partnering to provide a transparent, fundamentally different architecture that offers better performance per dollar, Cochrane explained. The duo combines SUSE’s Kubernetes management and AI operations software with Vultr’s cloud compute, GPU, and bare-metal services across 32 global regions — giving enterprises a credible path away from hyperscaler lock-in.

“We deliver better performance at a dramatically lower cost, and we’re between 50 and 90% lower cost than traditional hyperscalers and traditional cloud compute,” Cochrane said. “Overall, for our AI infrastructure stack, we’re going to be delivering anywhere, on recent benchmarks, like an 82% performance-per-dollar advantage.”

Cost efficiency, however, is only part of the equation, with data residency a core concern for international deployments. Vultr’s autonomous zones aim to ensure that data never leaves its designated region, an approach that both supports emerging regulations while maintaining the global control plane necessary for distributed applications, Cochrane noted.

“When you’re operating in that distributed globally scalable environment, you want to make sure that you’re doing [it] at the lowest possible cost of greatest operational efficiency because you’re scaling up infrastructure in so many different regions,” Cochrane said. “The industrial efficiency – the industrial scale of Vultr mapped with SUSE – I think, is the future of enterprise AI.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SUSECON 2026:

(* Disclosure: Vultr sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Vultr nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE