Markus Hendrich
Leading MaiaEdge's expansion into Europe.
I spent over a decade as Head of Network Engineering / CTO at QSC AG and Plusnet GmbH.
QSC was one of the first alternative DSL network operators in Germany, and we helped build the independent broadband infrastructure that broke Deutsche Telekom's monopoly on German internet access.
At that time, I also Co-authored the L2-BSA broadband standards with the national Next-Generation-Access Forum.
I went on to become CDO and later CEO of ecotel communication ag, and spent roughly a decade active in telecom regulatory work, helping shape the German market both nationally and at EU level.
At MaiaEdge, I work closely with Europe's Datacenter operators, fiber operators, carriers, and Internet Exchange Points on federated, sovereignty-aware connectivity.
Session
Inference is quietly overtaking training as the dominant AI workload, and unlike training — concentrated in a handful of hyperscale halls — inference wants to sit close to users, pulling AI capacity into distributed sites across Europe.
The industry has spent the last two years re-engineering Ethernet (via the Ultra Ethernet Consortium and platforms like NVIDIA Spectrum-X) to match InfiniBand's performance for exactly this kind of workload, and now even ships Ethernet fabrics purpose-built to stitch multiple physical data centers into one logical AI factory.
That's a solved problem when one company owns every site. This talk asks what happens when it isn't — when distributed inference has to span operators, jurisdictions, and ownership boundaries — and what a federated, policy-aware Ethernet fabric for that world would need to look like.