Think AI is the whole story? Think again.

Mark Laurence’s takeaways from ISC High Performance 2026 Every year, ISC High Performance offers a glimpse into the future of computing. This year’s event in Hamburg certainly delivered that, but perhaps not in the way many expected. After spending time across the exhibition floor, technical sessions and customer meetings, I found the conversation consistently extending beyond AI itself and towards the wider compute infrastructure needed to support it. Organisations planning their next generation of infrastructure face a different challenge today: bringing together CPUs, GPUs, networking, storage, cooling and emerging technologies into platforms that deliver real business value. AI is becoming part of HPC  One misconception that still exists outside the industry is that AI is somehow replacing traditional High Performance