The 4th ai-PULSE, a one-day AI conference run by cloud provider Scaleway at Station F in Paris on 13 October 2026. In-person entry is by application and is now closed; the sessions are livestreamed. The 2026 programme is built on three themes, ENTER, SHIFT and CTRL, with AMD as the only diamond partner.
ai-PULSE is a one-day technical conference on AI research, infrastructure and product demonstrations, run by the French cloud provider Scaleway at Station F in Paris. The 4th edition takes place on 13 October 2026. The official site describes it as a day for leaders and engineers, covering AI breakthroughs, research and product demonstrations. The programme is built on three themes: ENTER (access to compute, models and platforms), SHIFT (how fast models, hardware and new players change the market) and CTRL (control over data, costs and dependencies through open source and sovereign infrastructure).
13 October 2026, one day. Station F, 5 Parvis Alan Turing, 75013 Paris, France. The organiser's FAQ says the gates open at 9:00. The day-breakdown page lists opening keynotes from 09:30 to 11:30, technical talks from 12:00 to 18:00, networking and exhibition from 14:00 to 22:00, and a cocktail party from 18:00 to 22:00. The agenda page shows the last talks ending at about 17:55.
Scaleway, the French cloud provider, organises ai-PULSE and also sponsors it. Scaleway is a majority-owned subsidiary of iliad Group (per Wikipedia), and iliad Group's Deputy CEO, Aude Durand, is among the 2026 opening keynote speakers. Scaleway's own CEO, Damien Lucas, and COO, Albane Bruyas, also speak. The only organiser contact published for 2026 is info@ai-pulse.eu. An earlier research record names Fred Bardolle as a contact; he appears on the 2025 speaker roster as Head of Product, AI at Scaleway, and no email address is on record for him.
The organiser states 2,000+ on-site attendees for 2026 (unverifiable information before the event). The same 2,000+ figure was reported for the 2025 edition by Le Monde Informatique, which wrote that more than 2,000 people were at Station F on 4 December 2025. Entry is by application: the who-attends page cites 6,000+ applications, 2,000 on-site attendees and one in three selected, with technical profiles prioritised; it does not say which edition those figures describe. Its role split reads 53% founders and product leaders, 25% CTOs and engineering leaders, 17% AI and ML engineers, 2% partners and integrators, 2% media and analysts, and under 1% investors. Seniority is 26% C-level and technology officers, 28% engineering directors and heads of technology, and 46% senior engineers and applied specialists. Attendees come from 40+ countries (organiser figure). The industry split is labelled a 2025 snapshot: 56% technology, SaaS and digital platforms, 12% media, entertainment and creative tech, 8% manufacturing, energy and robotics, 7% public sector, research and education, 6% finance and insurance, 4% healthcare and life sciences, 7% other. None of these shares is independently audited.
The date moves from 4 December in 2025 to 13 October 2026, about seven weeks earlier in the year. The 2025 edition, the third, ran on 4 December 2025 at Station F under the themes Smarter, Faster and Everywhere. The 2024 edition, the second, ran on 7 November 2024, also at Station F. The 2026 themes are ENTER, SHIFT and CTRL, and the 2026 agenda tags sessions under sub-themes such as Physical AI, Silicon Migration, Strategic Autonomy and Token Economics. Aude Durand, Damien Lucas, Albane Bruyas, Neil Zeghidour, Steeve Morin and Ramine Roane also appear on the 2025 roster. The 2026 lineup is headed by keynotes from Mozilla, AMD, iliad Group, Bioptimus, KE:SAI, the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems, Living Models and PRESAGE. Networking runs through the Brella app, with matchmaking opening two weeks before the conference.
The agenda page lists opening keynotes on the Open Platform from 09:30 to 11:30, then three stages from about 12:00: the Master Stage, the Central room and the Founders Café. Keynote speakers are Raffi Krikorian (Mozilla), Aude Durand (iliad Group), Andrej Zdravkovic (AMD), Zelda Mariet (Bioptimus), Andreas Geiger (KE:SAI), Bernhard Schölkopf (ELLIS Institute Tübingen and Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems), Damien Lucas (Scaleway), Leonard Strouk (Living Models) and Tony Tung (PRESAGE). Master Stage sessions run 15 to 25 minutes and include:
The Central room and Founders Café carry shorter talks on AI security, agents, tabular foundation models, OCR and search, quantum optimisation and energy infrastructure agents. Against the themes recorded for the event: machine learning appears in the tabular foundation model and brain-decoding talks, LLMs in the open-weight and open-model inference sessions, AI deployment in the enterprise agent sessions, and cloud AI in the Scaleway-hosted model and open-infrastructure sessions. A Central room session titled "Powering European AI Innovation and Scale" (14:40) lists no speakers on the agenda page.
The speakers page lists 60 names, and the agenda adds one more, Rémi Louf of .txt, for 61 named speakers in all (published roster). The organiser's homepage claims 70+ speakers and its networking page 50+, so neither headline figure matches the published roster. The published roster, with titles as given by the organiser:
The format is a one-day conference with a plenary, parallel stages and a networking floor. Opening keynotes run on the Open Platform from 09:30 to 11:30. Talks of 10 to 35 minutes run on the Master Stage, the Central room and the Founders Café, with several panels of four to five speakers (for example "Scaling AI Through Open Infrastructure" at 16:15 and a venture panel at 17:05). A press conference, by invitation only, runs in the Central room from 12:20 to 13:55. Networking and an exhibition with partner booths run from 14:00 to 22:00. The day-breakdown page mentions workshops and four stages, but the agenda page shows three stages and no session labelled as a workshop (inconsistency on the organiser's site).
The organiser lists a cocktail party with drinks and a DJ from 18:00 to 22:00 at Station F. Brella handles 1:1 matchmaking meetings, badge scanning, speaker and partner corners, and a startup and investor track where fundraising founders can flag themselves. No separate fringe events, awards or satellite days are published for ai-PULSE 2026. An invitation-only press conference runs in the Central room from 12:20 to 13:55.
No ticket price is published for ai-PULSE 2026. In-person entry is by application and the registration page states that in-person registrations are closed; online access is available through a form on the same page, which does not state a price. The 2025 edition was listed at 0 EUR on Maddyness. Not publicly disclosed for 2026: whether in-person entry carries any fee.
Not publicly disclosed. No call for papers, speaker application form or deadline is published on the ai-PULSE site, and the 2026 roster is already published. The organiser's only listed contact is info@ai-pulse.eu. Several speakers come from partner companies (AMD, HPE, Fujitsu, Digital Realty, Giga Computing, Onepoint), so sponsoring appears to be one route to the stage, though the organiser does not state this.
The FAQ says to write to info@ai-pulse.eu for information on ai-PULSE 2026 partnership opportunities. No rate card, package contents or deadline is published. The partners page shows five tiers: diamond, gold, silver, a fourth community tier and startup. The networking page refers to partner booths, and the 2025 site carried a "request to become a partner" link, which the 2026 site does not.
The partners page lists, by tier from diamond down to startup (published roster; tiers as shown by the organiser):
Scaleway is the organiser and is not listed as a partner. Several logos on the page carry a tier that differs from their file name (for example Devoteam and Onepoint use startup-tier file names but sit under silver and the fourth tier), so tiers follow the headings.
By headcount, the organiser's audience split is 53% founders and product leaders, 25% CTOs and engineering leaders and 17% AI and ML engineers. By company type on the 2026 roster, the partners and speakers are mostly three groups: compute and hardware vendors (AMD, Giga Computing, HPE, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, VAST Data, Western Digital, Digital Realty, Nokia, VSORA, SiPearl), AI model and application startups (Hugging Face, Black Forest Labs, ElevenLabs, Kyutai, Runway, Gradium, pyannoteAI, Corti, LightOn, Dataiku), and consultancies and integrators (OCTO Technology, SFEIR, Devoteam, Onepoint, Valeuriad). Investors are a minority: CDP Venture Capital, Supernova Invest, Serena and IRIS speak on one panel, and the organiser reports under 1% investors in the audience. The 2025 industry snapshot has 56% in technology, SaaS and digital platforms.
Not publicly disclosed. No press accreditation page or form exists on the ai-PULSE site. The agenda shows a press conference, invitation only, in the Central room from 12:20 to 13:55 on 13 October 2026. The organiser reports that media and industry analysts make up 2% of attendees (organiser figure, not audited). The only published contact is info@ai-pulse.eu, which the site presents for partnership requests and code-of-conduct reports, not for press.
The official site quotes three outlets on its media coverage block. The French Tech Journal, in a piece by Chris O'Brien headlined "ai-Pulse 2024: France stakes claim to be Europe's AI power player", published 11 November 2024. IT for Business, in a 7 November 2024 article by Thierry Derouet on the second edition, reporting Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas saying the company would run more than 5,000 latest-generation GPUs within weeks. Republik IT, in an interview with Damien Lucas by Bertrand Lemaire, published 28 October 2024 and labelled sponsored. On 4 December 2025, Le Monde Informatique (Dominique Filippone) covered the third edition and reported more than 2,000 attendees, Nvidia B300 GPUs added to Scaleway's offer, an expanded Mistral partnership and a Yann LeCun keynote. Maddyness listed the 2025 edition at 0 EUR. No 2026 coverage had appeared at the time of verification. No media partner is named on the 2026 partners page.
Mixed. The Republik IT quote shown on the official site is presented as a journalist's line by Bertrand Lemaire, but it is the headline of a sponsored interview, and the quoted words ("the beauty of ai-PULSE is...") are those of Scaleway's own CEO, Damien Lucas. That item is placed coverage, not independent. The IT for Business article reports Lucas's GPU claim as a forward-looking statement and does not reconcile its own figures. The French Tech Journal piece is paywalled, so only its headline and byline could be read (partly unverifiable). Le Monde Informatique's 4 December 2025 report is independent, and its 2,000+ attendance figure matches the organiser's. All three quotes on the official site date from 2024; none covers the 2026 programme.
Anyone who needs in-person access and has not been accepted: in-person registrations are closed, and the organiser says it confirms or declines in-person applications a few days before the event, with declined applicants moved to the online stream. Buyers looking for a long exhibition floor should look elsewhere; the event is one day, and its agenda is talks-led. Attendees without a technical or AI-infrastructure background will find much of the programme (compute, silicon, inference, agent security) specialised. Speakers seeking a stage should note that no call for papers is published and the 2026 roster is set. Public-sector and policy audiences will find little: the organiser's 2025 audience snapshot has 7% public sector, research and education.
ai-PULSE is a single-day, application-gated conference run by a cloud vendor, held in Paris in autumn on 13 October 2026, with a compute, silicon and model-builder bent. Previous editions fell on 7 November 2024 and 4 December 2025, so the 2026 date is the earliest of the three in the calendar year. It is an annual event (editions in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026). No comparison with other events is made on the organiser's site.
No. All four editions (2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026) are recorded in Paris, and the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions at Station F. No regional or satellite ai-PULSE is announced on the official site. A separate "Quantum Industry Day in Switzerland 2026" is listed on 13 October 2026 in a Brella component, but it is a different event with its own organiser and has no stated link to ai-PULSE.
Not publicly disclosed as a policy. The 2026 site, agenda and session titles are in English, and the speaker roster is international, so English is the working language in practice. The organiser's site states no interpretation service.
Yes. The organiser's FAQ says all ai-PULSE conferences in Paris are livestreamed and that online registration is open through the form on the register page, which sends access details by email. Applicants refused in-person entry can attend online. The FAQ also says all conferences are recorded and available on demand after the event. The 2025 replays are online at 2025.ai-pulse.eu/replays, including the opening keynote and about 25 afternoon talks. The 2026 register page states that in-person registrations are closed.
Not publicly disclosed. No ticket price is published and no refund or cancellation terms appear on the FAQ, the register page or the code of conduct. The code of conduct says that a person expelled for breaching it is removed "without notice or reimbursement", which implies that some form of payment can exist, but no price is stated.
Yes, according to the organiser's FAQ. Station F meets handicap-access standards, with an access ramp, elevators, safety staff and a trained welcome team, and the main auditorium has 9 seats designed for people with disabilities. A free cloakroom is provided, small luggage may be stored there, and all items go through a magnetometer security check. The agenda page also offers an accessible version of the programme.
Station F is at 5 Parvis Alan Turing, 75013 Paris. The official practical-information page gives these routes.
The FAQ lists slightly different bus lines (132, 27, 61, 62), so the practical-information page is used here. The gates open at 9:00 and the organiser warns of queues.
ai-PULSE matters because it concentrates a hard-to-enter room around compute. The organiser reports 6,000+ applications for 2,000 seats, so access is selective rather than open, and the programme puts chip makers and silicon startups (AMD, VSORA, SiPearl, SpiNNcloud, Fujitsu) on the main stage next to model builders (Hugging Face, ElevenLabs, Kyutai, Black Forest Labs). Its three themes, ENTER, SHIFT and CTRL, frame compute access and control as the open question of 2026, which is the question a cloud provider has most to say about. For an engineer or CTO who wants to compare notes with those building the infrastructure, one day with 1:1 matchmaking is a short route to it; for a buyer who wants an independent verdict on vendors, it is not.
The headline numbers are the organiser's and they are not stable. The homepage claims 2,000+ attendees and 70+ speakers, the same pair the 2025 site carries for the previous edition, while the networking page says 50+ speakers and the published roster holds 61 names. The one outside check is Le Monde Informatique's report of more than 2,000 attendees on 4 December 2025, which supports the 2025 figure, not the 2026 one. The audience percentages are self-reported and unaudited, and one table is explicitly a 2025 snapshot. The press quotes on the site are from 2024, and the Republik IT line is a sponsored interview with Scaleway's own CEO. Read the figures as the organiser's description of a selective event, not as measured results.
Scaleway sits on both sides of ai-PULSE: it runs the event and fills six speaking slots on the published roster (Damien Lucas, Albane Bruyas, Doreen Pernel, Juan Pablo Fuquen, Nicolas Limage and Emilien Maudet), including a keynote and a place on both the silicon panel and the open-infrastructure panel. The partners page does not list Scaleway as a partner, and its hardware suppliers (AMD as diamond, Giga Computing and Digital Realty as gold, HPE and Dell in the fourth tier) share the stages. That is normal for a vendor conference and useful to a buyer comparing GPU and cloud options, but a reader should expect the compute story to be told from the organiser's catalogue.
Official site: https://www.ai-pulse.eu/ (pages: speakers, agenda, practical-information, networking, who-attends, partners, FAQ, register). Contact: info@ai-pulse.eu. The code of conduct is at https://www.scaleway.com/en/code-of-conduct-ai-pulse/. The 2025 edition archive and replays are at https://2025.ai-pulse.eu/. A research record names Fred Bardolle as a contact; no email or LinkedIn address is on record for him.