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Paul Maritz

Board member, Independent Board Member

Search every verified Paul Maritz interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Paul Maritz, a technology investor and former CEO of VMware, spoke at the Acronis Accelerate event on August 8, 2026, about the impact of AI on infrastructure. He stated that the AI revolution is likely to shift the pendulum away from hyperscale cloud dominance toward more distributed infrastructure and a greater variety of clouds. He also noted growing concerns among enterprises and governments about data sovereignty and control over AI models, which he said would increase demand for infrastructure choices. Maritz highlighted security risks posed by open-weight models, suggesting that both beneficial and malicious actors would gain access to advanced tools. Maritz also discussed challenges facing service providers, particularly regarding VMware, which he said has "been sinning of late" and has raised prices to "almost unsustainable levels." He encouraged MSPs to consider alternatives such as OpenStack and KVM-based solutions, including Acronis Cyber Frame, which he described as an integrated platform for backup, disaster recovery, security, and remote access. He suggested that adopting such solutions could help providers become trusted advisors and create new recurring revenue streams.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“Today we also have the situation when it comes to building infrastructure for AI and inference that Nvidia really rules the roost and you have to pay Nvidia prices obviously for the GPUs involved. But I think that's going to take change as well. We've got new architectures coming. First of all, we're seeing the arrival of unified memory architectures.”

“If you go down to number eight, you'll see the Neatron 32 billion parameter models scoring 46%. Now, if you think that's not very impressive, if you go further down to number 20, you'll find Claude Sonnet 4, one of the most popular models in the world, scoring only 26%. So, we have an openweight model, 32 billion parameters, downloadable from Hugging Face, that's eminently suitable to be moved out to more distributed”

“The obvious solution to this insatiable demand is to actually not try and recentralize everything and put everything into a few large hyperscale clouds but in fact to move the compute out to the edges into data centers and eventually into all the way down to individual devices.”

“The number of PO tokens being consumed is literally doubling every 3 months or so. So, we're demanding that our infrastructure produce trillions of tokens and the growth shows no letting up.”

“We are seeing a true revolution — for the first time computer systems can in some very real and meaningful way understand natural language. Almost overnight every computer interface in the world is now obsolete.”

“If I was at Microsoft I would not be rest. This is not a time to rest on your laurels. There's nothing that says that Microsoft of necessity has to be the force that it is in 15 years' time.”

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