Application-Defined Compute: Rethinking Infrastructure for AI Applications

AI applications don't have fixed infrastructure requirements. A single request can fan out into hundreds of long-running tasks with different runtimes, memory requirements, and execution times. The application is no longer just consuming infrastructure. It defines the infrastructure it needs at runtime. In this talk, Render CEO Anurag Goel introduces Application-Defined Compute, a new infrastructure model built for AI-native applications. You'll learn why traditional serverless platforms and self-managed orchestration both break down at scale, and how developers can provision compute just in time, run long-lived stateful workloads, and execute tasks with the flexibility of real servers, without managing queues, worker pools, retries, or orchestration themselves. Using Render Workflows as an example, the session explores the new infrastructure primitives emerging for AI-native applications and how cloud platforms are evolving to support them.