State of the cloud 2026: AI's hype train continues, agents go primetime, and sovereignty shifts left

Severalnines CEO Vinay Joosery and guest Sanjeev Mohan, principal analyst at SanjMo, kickoff Sovereign DBaaS Decoded’s 2026 season with their annual discussion on the state of the cloud — this time through the lens of AI infrastructure economics, agents going primetime, and sovereignty becoming mainstream.

In this episode, they have a lively discussion on what 2026’s AI hype train truly means for data and cloud strategy: why the next wave isn’t just “bigger models,” but reliable AI driven by post-training and reinforcement learning so organizations can actually deploy agentic systems without sleepless nights. They also unpack cloud's evolution into an operating model that increasingly extends on-premises, as enterprises chase the unstructured and legacy data that remains outside of the public cloud.

Sanjeev offers sharp perspectives on why sovereignty is shifting left, i.e. moving from residency checkboxes and contract language into architecture (keys, control planes, operational boundaries, and assurance engineered up front). They also dig into the rise of compute-to-data and zero-copy patterns (SEE ETL's slow death), why Kubernetes is getting a second wind for AI workload orchestration, and how power and grid constraints are starting to shape where capacity gets built, who gets it, and how pricing behaves.

Whatever your level of responsibility, this episode is jam-packed with practical calls on the constraints and opportunities shaping 2026—and what to prioritize if you’re building, buying, or operating data platforms in the age of agents.

Find out more about Sovereign DBaaS at https://severalnines.com/sovereign-dbaas