Who Controls Your AI? Open Data Formats, Private Inference, and True Sovereignty

# 🚀 PANEL DISCUSSION:

# Who Controls Your AI? Open Data Formats, Private Inference, and True Sovereignty

🗓️ Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
⏰ Time: 6:00PM to 8:00PM SGT
REGISTRATION: 5:00PM to 6:00PM
📍 Location: Sands Expo & Convention Center, Orchid and Melati Ballrooms, Singapore, 018956
🎟️ Official Registration Required: REGISTER HERE

### About This Community Meetup

Welcome to Community Meetups @ EVOLVE!
Community Meetups are informal, topic-focused gatherings designed to bring together developers, builders, and technology leaders across data, AI, analytics, and Open Source. Join us the evening before EVOLVE to connect, exchange real-world experiences, hear from panel experts, and build relationships with peers who are actively shaping the future of the ecosystem.
While the main stages at EVOLVE focus on broader business strategies, this session is carved out specifically for engineering, architecture, and Open Source practitioners. Expect a casual, yet deep technical dive into data infrastructure.

💡 The Core Topic
Between shifting global regulatory frameworks and strict local data residency laws, digital sovereignty has moved from a compliance checklist to a core architectural requirement. This reality means that if your data formats are locked into proprietary systems or your AI models rely entirely on closed APIs, your platform isn't fully under your control.
Hosted by the Cloudera Open Source Program Office (OSPO), this panel brings together open-source contributors, systems architects, and infrastructure engineers to look past the buzzwords and talk about the practical tech required to build an autonomous, AI-ready data stack.

### 🎙️ What We’ll Cover

• Open Data Architecture: Building on open standards such as Apache Iceberg to enable data portability, interoperability, lineage, and governance without platform lock-in.
• Sovereign AI in Practice: The engineering realities of deploying, fine-tuning, and running open-weights models locally to avoid third-party data leakage.
• Hybrid Lakehouse Infrastructure: Designing data platforms that satisfy local compliance and regulatory boundaries without slowing down developer velocity.

### 👥 Panel Lineup

• Host: Samriddhi Bhatnagar
• Moderator: Diego Mastroianni

#### 🗣️ Panelists:

• Bill Zang — VP, Product Strategies @ Cloudera
• Focusing on open data standards, keeping data sovereign and portable, and decoupling data from underlying storage platforms.
• Ameen Khan S — Sr. GTM Specialist Solutions Architect (Data & AI) @ AWS
• Focusing on hybrid architecture realities—how to leverage hyperscaler compute without giving up data control.
• Shun Utsui — Partner AI Deployment Strategist @ Mistral AI
• Focusing on sovereign AI—the practical technical differences between calling closed corporate APIs vs. hosting open-weights models on sovereign infrastructure.

### 🍕 The Finish

Join us for an honest, peer-to-peer technical conversation about building self-sufficient data platforms. Grab some good food, a cold drink, and bring your hard engineering questions!
👉 Space is limited! Please make sure to lock in your spot by registering on our official page:
🔗 Register Here via EVOLVE Singapore Page