Two senior iGaming executives have argued that the difference between a profitable market entry and an operational mess often comes down to one overlooked decision: infrastructure. At the recent Tech Race Summit hosted by the SOFTSWISS iGaming software platform, Sergey Kastukevich, Chief Technology Officer at SOFTSWISS, and Nick Dvas, Chief Operations and Product Officer at infrastructure provider Servers.com, laid out why operators keep stumbling when they scale across borders. Their conclusion was blunt. Treat infrastructure as an afterthought, and every new jurisdiction becomes a new liability.
What Operators Should Take From the Tech Race Discussion
The exchange between the two executives was less about selling technology and more about the sequence of decisions that determine whether international growth holds together. For executives weighing expansion, the practical implications are specific.
- Regulation drives the entry decision, not the other way around. Data residency, retention and protection rules differ by market, and some of them are mutually incompatible.
- Infrastructure planning belongs in the market-entry strategy from day one, not after the licence is secured.
- Cloud is no longer the automatic answer. AI-driven data volumes have pushed storage, computation and transfer costs high enough to reshape the economics of a market entry.
- Modular architecture is shifting from a competitive edge to a baseline requirement for operating under stricter regulatory regimes.
- Sports betting exposes the distribution problem fastest, because timing gaps between locations can open arbitrage windows.
Why Regulation Comes Before the Server Decision
Both executives put regulation at the front of the queue. And for good reason. A jurisdiction that insists on data staying inside its borders forces an operator into geographically distributed infrastructure, which then collides with the data-protection and retention rules of the next market on the list.
Dvas pointed to sports betting as the clearest illustration of the tension. “The system has to be distributed enough to provide a competitive user experience, but coordinated enough to avoid opportunities created by timing differences between locations,” he said. “If odds are updated at slightly different moments, geographical distribution can create arbitrage opportunities.”
The problem is a familiar one to anyone who has built latency-sensitive systems: you want the data close to the user, but you cannot afford the two copies to disagree. A punter who spots stale odds in one region against fresh odds in another has found a crack in the architecture, not a betting opportunity the operator intended to offer.
Kastukevich framed the discipline around manageability. “The goal is not simply to deploy locally,” he said. “It is to expand while keeping the platform manageable and the customer experience consistent.” Each new jurisdiction, left unchecked, adds its own data environment and its own operational process. Multiply that across a dozen markets and the platform becomes something no single team can reason about.
The Cloud Calculation Has Quietly Flipped
For most of the past decade, the answer to “how do we simplify international infrastructure?” was cloud. That assumption is loosening.
“Cloud remains an important enabler, but it can also amplify costs,” Dvas said. The pressure point is data volume. “AI has dramatically increased the amount of data being generated, processed and retrieved. As a result, storage, computation and data transfer can become extremely expensive in the cloud.”
The question has moved on. It is no longer whether to use cloud, but where to point it, matching its flexibility to the specific functions that actually benefit from elasticity while keeping predictable, high-volume workloads elsewhere. Dvas called this one of the most consequential technical and financial choices an operator makes, the kind that can decide whether a new market pays for itself.
Which raises a harder question for finance teams: how many operators have actually audited what their cloud bill buys them, versus what it simply absorbs?
How Infrastructure Priorities Are Expected to Shift
Looking toward the end of the decade, both executives described an optimisation process that looks little like today’s.
| Area | Expected shift |
|---|---|
| Operations | Fully AI-native, with networking, storage and processing built to support rapid, exponential scaling |
| Architecture | Modular design moves from competitive advantage to a basic requirement for meeting stricter regulatory regimes across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously |
| Economics | Growth capability balanced against financial resilience and deliberate cost discipline |
| Culture | Closer integration between gambling operations and the technology teams that enable them |
AI-native is the phrase doing the heavy lifting here. In plain terms, it means systems designed around machine-driven data flows from the start, rather than retrofitted onto platforms built for human-scale traffic.
The Gap Between Gambling and Technology
Running underneath the entire discussion was a cultural point. The commercial side of iGaming has no shortage of conferences, panels and dealmaking forums. The technology side that makes commercial growth possible gets far less dedicated attention, a distinction the industry has been slow to correct.
“That is the purpose of the Tech Race,” Kastukevich said. “The industry already has many forums for discussing commercial growth. We wanted to create a space where people could examine the technology that makes that growth possible — and the decisions that determine whether it remains sustainable.”
Sustainable is the operative word. Growth that compounds operational complexity faster than revenue is not growth an operator can live with for long.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should an iGaming operator settle before entering a new market?
Regulation first. Data residency, protection, storage and retention rules vary by jurisdiction and can conflict with one another, so the infrastructure plan has to reflect those constraints before any commercial launch.
Is cloud still the default choice for international operators?
Not automatically. Both executives argued that AI-driven data growth has made cloud storage, computation and transfer expensive enough that operators now need to apply it selectively rather than wholesale.
Why does sports betting complicate distributed infrastructure?
Because odds updated at slightly different moments across locations can create arbitrage openings. The infrastructure must be distributed for performance yet tightly coordinated to close those gaps.
What is meant by a modular architecture becoming a requirement?
It means building the platform in interchangeable components so individual markets’ regulatory demands can be met without rebuilding the whole system each time. What was once a differentiator is becoming the price of entry.
