Civo Navigate London 2026 Wrap-Up

This week marks the end of our fourth Civo Navigate London event, and it feels like a good moment to say that this one had a slightly different energy from the ones before it. Over the past four years, we have hosted 10 Civo Navigate events across North America, India, and Europe, and each one has taught us something new about what this community actually wants from a day like this. London 2026 was no exception, and I think this year's lineup pushed that a little further than usual.

We were joined by an incredible group of speakers, including Lord Drayson (Locai Labs), Kelsey Hightower, Amanda Brock (OpenUK, CEO), and Craig Duffie (Nokia AI & Cloud UK&I).

As always, we want to say a proper thank you to everyone who made this event happen, including our sponsors, our attendees, our speakers, and of course the whole Civo team who spent months putting this together. Across the day, we hosted 20 talks and workshops, covering everything from digital sovereignty to artificial intelligence and where the industry might be heading next.

Keynote sessions

Mark Boost opens the day

Mark Boost opened the main stage in front of a packed room, and it did not take long to see why this year's keynote had been kept so tightly under wraps.

Mark was also joined by David Sullivan (Director, Foundational & Customer Facing AI, Starling Bank), and Aleksei Shishkin (VP Technology Operations, Behavox) who shared their experience using Civo before Dinesh Majrekar (CTO, Civo), Josh Mesout (Chief Innovation Officer, Civo), and Kelsey Hightower joined the stage. They shared the message that Civo has been building toward for a while now... the choice between public cloud, private cloud, and simply trusting a hyperscaler with your data should never have been a choice people were forced to make in the first place.

The Unveiling

The opening moments of the keynote were reserved for something Civo has been building quietly for a long time. Mark Boost used the stage to reveal the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, alongside the liquid-cooled UK edge data centre built around it.

This is a landmark UK project. The plan is a national edge build, starting with one liquid-cooled site in Hertfordshire and a commitment to thirty-nine more sites to follow, bringing the total to forty across the UK.

The infrastructure itself is built for inference. It is low latency by design, built for the kind of AI workloads that need to happen close to the work and cannot afford to wait on a round trip to somewhere else. Every single rack in the new edge sites will house seventy-two NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and thirty-six Vera CPUs, delivering 20.7 terabytes of HBM4 memory per rack and up to 3,600 PFLOPS of NVFP4 inference performance. The entire build is 100 percent direct liquid-cooled.

Reinventing Infrastructure for the AI Era

After a keynote that had already given the room plenty to talk about, Mark Boost was joined by Anthony Sarno (CEO AI Factories), for a candid conversation on stage. This fireside chat explored how the demands of AI are reshaping the data center and challenging traditional approaches to cloud infrastructure. The speakers went into how Civo is rethinking the foundations of compute to build faster, more efficient, and more accessible infrastructure for what comes next.

Hot topics from Civo Navigate London 2026

At Civo Navigate London 2026, we were joined by attendees from a genuinely broad mix of organizations, and across 20 sessions we heard perspectives ranging from public sector policy to frontier AI research. Here are some of the themes that came up most often throughout the day. 

Digital sovereignty

Sovereignty has been a growing theme across every Navigate event over the past two years, and London 2026 continued that trend with a sharper focus on practical implementation rather than theory. The Unveiling set the tone early, and the Digital Sovereignty Panel picked that thread up directly.

The panel was moderated by Simon Hansford, Chief Commercial Officer at Civo, and brought together Lord Drayson (Chairman, Locai Labs), Richard Woodfield (Head of Solution Services, DataVita), Dan Chester (Global Director, NeoCloud Programs, VAST Data), and Ed Barker (Founder & Managing Director, Havishams). The panelists spoke to the frontline political perspective on how the UK is navigating AI governance, data regulation, and the push for domestic digital infrastructure, while Lord Drayson brought a rare mix of authority as a life sciences entrepreneur, former Defence Procurement Minister, and a leading figure in the UK's sovereign AI landscape.

Agentic AI and accountability

Agentic AI was easily one of the most discussed topics of the day, and it came up in almost every session in some form. The conversation kept returning to one uncomfortable question, which is who is actually accountable when an autonomous system is the one making the decision.

James Faure, who works as Director of Agentic AI at Clairo AI, brought a builder's perspective to the topic with a session on cross-tenant federated learning for regulated industries, while Fatima Sarah Khalid from GitLab offered a developer tooling angle on the same conversation. Lindley Lentati, Founder of Tertium AI and Co-Founder of Cambridge Inference, added a research and policy perspective, arguing that the UK needs to treat sovereign AI as a national security requirement rather than a nice to have. Josh Mesout spoke about what sovereign AI infrastructure actually looks like in practice through his work on relaxAI.

Cloud infrastructure and platform engineering

The AI and Cloud Native room brought a more hands-on set of sessions to the day. Jeremy Murray, Founder and CEO of stack8s, presented a reference architecture for running Kubeflow, MLflow, and Argo Workflows on on-premises HPC, built around real work supporting dementia research at Imperial College's UK Dementia Research Institute. Semira Allen, Engineering Manager MLOps at Grainger, walked through what it actually takes to extend DevOps practices such as automation, CI/CD, and observability into the messier world of machine learning. Shubhangi Goyal, Senior Analyst at Admiral Group, closed this thread with a session on designing context first AI systems, and what teams get wrong when they treat context as an afterthought.

Community and sponsor highlights 

We had the pleasure of being joined by an amazing group of sponsors, including Groundcover, Teleport, Nokia, VAST, Supermicro, World Wide Technology, Defense.com, and Extend Robotics, alongside a strong group of community and media partners who helped bring the day together. Our sponsors joined us in London for some genuinely great conversations and live demos of their product offerings throughout the day.

Once again, we want to say a proper thank you to everyone who made this event possible. Over the coming weeks, we will be updating our website with more information about the event, and we will be uploading recordings of the main stage sessions as they become available. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X to keep up with those announcements as they come.

Upcoming events: Civo Navigate London 2027

We are excited to announce the return of Civo Navigate London for another year. If this event proved anything, it is that sovereignty stops being an abstract idea the moment you put policymakers, engineers, and the people actually building agentic systems in the same room and ask them to defend their position.

📅 September 27th, 2027

📌 Convene, 155 Bishopsgate, Liverpool Street, London, EC2M 3TQ