By Anders Bylund
Publication Date: 2026-06-11 11:19:00
For years, enterprise IT strategy followed a simple script: Move workloads to the public cloud. Amazon (AMZN 2.39%) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT 1.29%) Azure, and Alphabet‘s (GOOG 2.23%) (GOOGL 1.95%) Google Cloud built massive businesses on that assumption.
But the AI era is throwing a spanner in the cloud computing works.
Image source: Getty Images.
The gravitational pull of stubborn data
“Hybrid cloud and AI are two sides of the same coin,” said Dr. Hillery Hunter, CTO and general manager of innovation for IBM (IBM 1.70%) Infrastructure. “Where your data is, is becoming very much a grounding factor, because where your data is, is then where you naturally want to build out your AI.”
That makes sense, right? It’s the concept of data gravity in action.
Once enterprise data settles somewhere, it tends to stay put. It accumulates. It gets comfortable. And moving it becomes a difficult production. Taking a large company’s data out of its natural habitat incurs egress fees, data…
