Paris
RAISE AI Summit 2026

Off the train 19:42, at the hotel ~20:05–20:15 whichever you pick:

The elegant circular square two minutes from the hotel door — a good first stretch of the legs after check-in. From here the covered passages (Galerie Vivienne is the prettiest) lead toward Palais-Royal if you want a longer loop before dinner.

RAISE Week side event, 19:30–22:00 at Hôtel Madame Rêve — the rooftop-crowned former central post office, a 5-minute walk from your hotel. Registration was pending organizer approval at build time: if the Luma confirmation lands, this replaces dinner (canapés count) and turns arrival night into networking hour one. You'd walk in around 20:30 — perfectly normal for these evenings.

Five minutes from the hotel: a lively pedestrian food street with bistros, oyster bars and terraces that stay open late. The relaxed arrival-night dinner if Inference Above isn't approved — no reservation needed on a Tuesday if you sit by 21:00.

Bring photo ID + the ticket QR from the RAISE Week app (offline screenshot). Badge goes on the right side; make the queue the Swiss-delegation meeting point.

Your home turf: sovereign cloud, trusted infrastructure, the energy–compute nexus. Speakers to hunt in the app: Amin Vahdat (Google, AI infra), Mark Papermaster (AMD CTO), Charlie Kawwas (Broadcom), Pat Gelsinger, Sachin Katti (OpenAI industrial compute), and NVIDIA EMEA's 'AI 5-Layer Cake' session on scaling energy, infrastructure and intelligence.

Eric Schmidt, Yann LeCun, Mark Cuban and Sebastian Kurz are confirmed; Emmanuel Macron is announced to address the summit (slot unconfirmed — expect security lines that day, arrive earlier than usual). Pick two or three; leave gaps for corridor conversations, which is where the actual value is.

19:00–22:00 on the rooftop of Madame Rêve (43 Rue Étienne Marcel): cocktails and a curated group of AI compute & infrastructure leaders, hosted by Mirantis, IREN and NVIDIA — no panels, no pitches, pure high-signal networking squarely on your Dell lens. Your spot is approved; the .pkpass ticket is in the wallet. It's a 12-minute walk from the summit and 5 from your hotel — the geometry could not be better. Check whether Gilles got in too.

A deliberate lap of the storage/compute/datacenter ecosystem: NetApp (George Kurian speaking), DDN, Weka, Vertiv, Cerebras all have leadership on site. Note what they lead with, what customers they parade, and what's conspicuously absent — Dell isn't listed as a 2026 sponsor, which makes the intel run more useful, not less. RAISE the STAKES startup pitches run on the floor too — good for spotting who's building on whose infrastructure.

Fill gaps from day one — LeCun or Schmidt if you missed them, Mistral's Arthur Mensch, Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf, or Anthropic's international lead for the model-maker view. Check overnight app updates: second-day schedules shift.

Nothing insurance-specific was confirmed at build time, so this is a hunt: the VINTAGE Enterprise AI sub-summit is the most likely home for insurance/health use-cases, and NYSE/Nasdaq/BofA speakers anchor the capital-markets side. Sync with Gilles the night before on which two sessions you attend together — shared sessions make the debrief dinner better.

The informal, curated networking space runs today: smaller rooms, longer conversations, no stage noise. This is the highest-value hour for the 'meet the AI ecosystem' goal — go with a target list, not a drift.

The Thursday-evening send-off. ✅ Included with your PRO ticket (confirmed via the event bot, 5 Jul); venue and time are announced in the app closer to the event — check it Wednesday. It's the last window to convert two-day acquaintances into contacts that survive the train home: send LinkedIn requests before the party ends, while faces still match names.

On Rue Montorgueil, the oldest pâtisserie in Paris (1730, founded by Louis XV's pastry chef) — opens early. A baba au rhum for the road, or breakfast if the hotel's is skippable.

Target: concourse by 09:45 for the 10:16 (doors close 10:14). On arrival check the departure board immediately — Hall 1, 2 and 3 platforms are far apart — and have the QR ready in the SBB app.

If you're on the concourse by 09:45 as planned, the espresso at Le Train Bleu's bar upstairs is the best-decorated ten minutes in French railways. Then platform: the ticket QR is in the SBB app, seat in Première.