Biography
Nouamane Tazi is a Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face, focused on large-scale distributed LLM training. He is the lead author of the Ultra-Scale Playbook and a core developer of Nanotron, Hugging Face's open-source distributed training library. His work spans projects like StarCoder2, SmolLM3, and Mixture-of-Experts scaling. He is passionate about making large-scale training practical and accessible.
Sessions
- AI For TechSpeaker
Workshop 1 - The Ultra-Scale Talk: Scaling Training to Thousands of GPUs
Tuesday 22 September, 10:00 – 11:20Workshop Room ATraining large language models demands more than raw compute. it requires a deep understanding of parallelism and architecture choices. This talk dives into the practicalities of ultra-scale training: how 5D parallelism makes it possible to stretch a single run across massive GPU clusters, how Mixture-of-Experts architectures introduce new scaling dimensions and stability challenges, and the performance tuning and communication patterns that drive throughput. Drawing from the Ultra-Scale Playbook and real-world scaling efforts, we'll cover benchmarks, hard-earned lessons, and hands-on recommendations for engineers and researchers ready to train state-of-the-art models efficiently!
- AI FoundationsSpeaker
Debate 3 — Sovereign AI or Surrender? Should Europe Stop Outsourcing Its AI Future?
Wednesday 23 September, 12:00 – 12:55Auditorium StageEurope is building 13 AI Factories, funding Mistral and Aleph Alpha, demanding open weights, and writing the world's strictest AI law. Yet 90% of European AI compute still runs on AWS, Azure and GCP, and the foundation model leaderboards are American and Chinese. So is sovereign AI the project of the decade for European strategic autonomy — or an expensive industrial-policy fantasy that taxes EU founders without producing winners? One debater says Europe must stop renting its future. The other says we already lost — partner up and accept it.
With Damien Acheson, Justin Strharsky, Jan Kavalírek, Pedro Romera, Siobhan Fairman, Diego Perino
- AI For GrowthSpeaker
Debate 4 — The 2027 Crash: Is AI the New Dot-Com Bubble?
Wednesday 23 September, 16:00 – 16:55Auditorium Stage$500 billion in AI capex this year alone. NVIDIA at a $4-trillion market cap. Startups raising $1 billion before product. And a chorus of investors, economists and former bulls now whispering the b-word. Is AI the most important infrastructure build of the century — worth every dollar — or the largest mispricing of risk since 1999, with the 2027 hangover already booked? The closing debate of AI Summit Barcelona puts a believer and a sceptic in the ring while the audience decides whether to ride the wave or run for cash.
With Damien Acheson, Roger Almuni, Astghik Zakharyan, Jorge Blasco, Oriol Juncosa, Lily Joo