AI Leadership Forum Launches ‘Endless Memory with CXL®’ Series of Events

CXL moving from promise to deployment

OCEANSIDE, CA, UNITED STATES, September 18, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — IT Brand Pulse today announced a 4-part series of the AI Leadership Forum events, “Endless Memory with CXL”. The virtual events are designed to help developers and enterprise IT users respond to extraordinary increases in AI memory capacity and costs. In 2026, Meta’s Vistara CXL chips and Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL’s) Abaco system demonstrate that Compute Express Link^® has crossed the threshold from emerging technology to production infrastructure. At the AI Leadership Forum, experts from Meta and PNNL will share firsthand insights into their CXL deployments. Register to attend one or more of the AI Leadership Forum events.

According to Frank Berry, Founder and analyst with IT Brand Pulse, “Memory requirements are soaring, DRAM prices are rising, memory is consuming a larger share of infrastructure budgets, and billions of dollars of usable DDR4 are being stranded in retired servers. Together, these forces are accelerating the move from CXL evaluation to production deployment.”

4 Forces Making CXL an AI Infrastructure Priority

1. The urgency to put CXL into production is driven by the sharp rise in DRAM capacity. Industry forecasts show a 3.6X increase in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) per GPU since 2023 when the H100 GPU started mass deployments. At the AI Leadership Forum events, you’ll learn how to scale memory capacity higher with new classes of CXL Add-In Cards (AICs) and pooling systems.

2. A 5.67X spike in DRAM prices since 2024 making memory architecture a hot issue for enterprise IT, system builders, and cloud operators. At the AI Leadership Forum, you’ll see how CXL improves utilization with memory pooling and sharing.

3. It’s estimated that in 2027, memory will comprise a whopping 68% of cloud service provider capex. At the AI Leadership Forum, you’ll hear how CXL reduces the amount of memory needed by increasing utilization, buying less servers, and reusing memory that’s already paid for.

4. Servers are typically refreshed every 4–5 years, while DDR memory typically lasts 10–12 years. That leaves DDR4 DIMMs with roughly half their useful life remaining when the host server is retired. At the AI Leadership Forum, Meta and Penguin Solutions will explain how CXL creates an opportunity for enterprises and cloud service providers to reuse hundreds of millions of memory modules by using CXL to bridge old memory to new servers.

The Four-Episode CXL Journey

The AI Leadership Forum events will take place September 30, October 28, December 3 and January 13. Each event builds on the previous program, moving from CXL fundamentals to real-world memory expansion and pooling, DDR4 reuse, and the emerging memory-centric architectures needed for AI.
Vendors will deliver a logical progression of sessions across the four events, allowing attendees to follow the development of the technology much like episodes in a technical series, and later watch the entire progression on demand.

Episode 1 | September 30: CXL 101 and the New AI Memory Hierarchy
The opening event establishes the foundation of why AI is creating a memory capacity problem, how CXL works, and how memory expansion, pooling, sharing and tiering can complement HBM and conventional server memory. Attendees will leave with the technical framework needed to understand the deployments and solutions explored in the next three events. Register to attend episode 1 at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cpFjqaSWRtSo5xIw83-IDQ#/registration

Episode 2 | October 28: The Emerging Memory-Centric Data Center
This event brings the series together around the emerging memory-centric data center. As AI inference, KV cache, agentic AI, databases, analytics and HPC demand larger memory footprints, the industry needs architectures that extend beyond the memory physically installed in a single server. The concluding program will examine how CXL expansion, pooling, sharing and reuse can become additional tiers in the AI memory hierarchy. Register to attend episode 2 at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TqIw50iwSUqpcROHr96Afw#/registration

Episode 3 | December 2: Meta and Penguin Solutions on Reusing DDR4
The third event tackles one of the most immediate economic opportunities for CXL: reusing valuable DDR4 memory that would otherwise become stranded as older servers are retired. Meta will lead off with an overview of its Vistara technology and deployment, demonstrating CXL-based DDR4 reuse at hyperscale.

Penguin Solutions will then introduce a program developed in partnership with major server OEMs that enables enterprises to reuse existing DDR4 DIMMs with Penguin CXL add-in cards. The memory is installed on the CXL cards and tested by Penguin, creating a path for enterprises to turn existing DDR4 assets into usable capacity for newer infrastructure rather than replacing that capacity entirely with newly purchased memory.

IT Brand Pulse estimates that the worldwide enterprise server installed base could contain on the order of hundreds of millions—and potentially approaching one billion—DDR4 DIMMs. The estimate is modeled rather than an industry-reported installed-base count, but it illustrates the scale of the potential reuse opportunity. Register to attend episode 3 at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CtE0HSGHTCWUtLw7Q7EmMQ#/registration

Episode 4 | January 13: PNNL Abaco, CXL Memory Pooling in the Real World
The second event moves from architecture to a real user implementation. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will provide an overview of its Abaco CXL memory pooling system, joined by supplier partners representing key layers of the stack: Micron for famfs, Liqid for the system, and Scalemem for fabric management. Together, the sessions will show how CXL memory pooling is assembled, managed and used as a complete system rather than as an isolated component. Register to attend episode 4 at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tEEHcMhAQwmRNyoVcVIGgg#/registration

About the AI Leadership Forum

The AI Leadership Forum, managed by IT Brand Pulse, is a community initiative bringing together technology leaders, developers, researchers and enterprise practitioners working on the infrastructure powering artificial intelligence. Formerly the AI Infra Forum, the community hosted 16 Forum events since 2022 and distributes educational content through events, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, newsletters and other digital channels.

Frank Berry
IT Brand Pulse
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