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Alex Bouzari

Cofounder, DataDirect Networks

Search every verified Alex Bouzari interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In an October 2026 interview at PTC'DC with JSA TV, Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder of DataDirect Networks (DDN), discussed the evolving landscape of AI infrastructure. He stated that the first wave of AI infrastructure focused on building capacity, while the next wave will focus on deploying that infrastructure at scale for inference and agentic workloads. Bouzari emphasized that data centers should be architected to accommodate a diversity of workloads, including open, closed, and frontier models, while also incorporating software technology that maximizes efficiency. Bouzari asserted that the primary competitors in AI are the United States and China, characterizing the dynamic as the former having chips and the latter having power. He recommended that data center leaders plan for flexible infrastructure to avoid overbuilding or falling behind, and he highlighted the growing importance of globally distributed, smaller-footprint data centers to support inference and agentic workloads, suggesting this trend is underrecognized relative to large-scale gigawatt facilities.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“We live in a world now where every country really needs to put in place AI infrastructures AI factories that are sovereign in nature. So it has to be air gapped it has to be controlled. It has to be safe and secure. And at the conference, what we're seeing is all nations want to do that. They want to leverage the technologies that are available out there, but they want to do it in the context of their own nation.”

“It's really an alignment, I think, between earnings per share in the world of finance where we are today and token monetization. So I think the reason why our adoption in the Fortune 500 is skyrocketing is we're able to align the token economics and the ROI associated with that with the business and financial outcomes that CEOs, CIOs and CFOs are seeking across industries.”

“The CFOs are turning into operational people. And you're starting to see the chief people officer when you hear agents are doing work. So, you're seeing the C-suite actually start their thinking shift happening. It's becoming transformational. So, our conversations with CFOs and CEOs help us understand: what are the pain points and what are the business outcomes that you're trying to drive? From that, with an archite”

“Together, we've been able to achieve 95% plus TPU utilization, which is huge. It's amazing. And the industry is pushing for agentic enablement, which is definitely the new wave. We're seeing it, Google is seeing it. Together we're enabling it, but the costs are now starting to increase substantially. Organizations are now seeing spends by their employees north of 10, $20,000 a month. And so it's great to say agentic,”

“Agentic AI I think is making a huge difference. We have customers now who are utilizing internally trillions of tokens per month. Well, that's fantastic. It's helping drive value, but the economics have to pencil out. And so you need a data engine that delivers a number of token per hours where the ROI works out. And I think that's what we're doing. That's what our partnership with Google is enabling. We're able to d”

“I think it comes down to a very simple thing, how saturated your GPUs and TPUs are, because those are super expensive, hard to find, and that drives a lot of the TCO. And one of the complaints you will hear from a lot of the companies that we work with is like, 'I'm not getting the return on my investment because they are overspending when it comes to the infrastructure.' And when you go and double-click that thing, ”

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