AI Factories Explained: What’s Actually New?

AI factory is one of those terms that seemed to appear overnight. Vendors are talking about it. Enterprises are investing in it. Governments are funding it. But what is an AI factory, really? In this episode of the TWIML Briefing Room, recorded live at HPE Discover 2026, I sit down with Thierry Pienaar, CTO of AI & HPC at HPE, and Kaushik Shirhatti, VP of AI Factory at NVIDIA, to unpack what’s actually changing in enterprise AI infrastructure. We discuss: • Why inference—not training—is reshaping enterprise AI • The real difference between cloud, on-prem, and hybrid AI deployments • Why da