AI's power shift begins at the edge

Cloud isn't king anymore. AI is moving home to your laptop, your office, and your private cloud. What's driving this silent shift from scale to sovereignty? The answer lies at the edge, where performance meets control

- PCQ Bureau

It’s no longer just about the cloud. In a world where AI workloads are scaling across industries and continents, the infrastructure powering them is undergoing a radical transformation. From hyperscale public clouds to sovereign data zones and edge inference on personal laptops, the new face of enterprise computing is both fragmented and deeply interconnected.

Harish Kohli, President & Managing Director, Acer India, offers a window into this fast-evolving landscape where the rules of digital architecture are being rewritten, not just for tech giants but for enterprises of all sizes.

From cloud supremacy to AI-on-everything

For a long time, the cloud was the go-to destination for everything: storage, compute, AI training, and analytics. Giants like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud became digital backbones for enterprise operations. But that’s changing.

Data sovereignty laws, rising privacy concerns, and the need for low-latency performance have made enterprises rethink their reliance on global hyperscalers. What’s emerging is a new model: decentralized, hybrid, and closer to the user. Some call it sovereign cloud; others call it cloud-to-edge continuum. Either way, the shift is real.

Acer's response to this shift is two-pronged. On one side are AI-ready laptops acting as powerful edge compute nodes. These devices allow workloads to be processed locally, reducing dependency on centralized systems, cutting costs, and improving latency. On the other side, Altos, Acer’s enterprise solutions arm, delivers core infrastructure: servers, workstations, storage, and virtualization that power on-premise AI training, analytics, and model hosting.

Together, they enable a seamless AI-to-Edge-to-Cloud pipeline.

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