Europe is framing “sovereign AI” around control of infrastructure and data, not isolation, and wants AI factories built on local energy, industry, and research strengths.
The real battle is over compute and data centers in-region, with enough GPUs, storage, and connectivity to train and run models under European rules and values.
Open source is positioned as a sovereignty tool to avoid lock-in, with Dell pitching itself as the neutral, multi-vendor hardware layer under European clouds and platforms.
Agentic AI raises the bar, pushing Europe to make new builds “agentic ready” in terms of GPU density, interconnect, data pipelines, and governance, instead of retrofitting old stacks.
Public–private partnerships are critical to fund chips, power-efficient infrastructure, and sovereign clouds, with Dell showcasing Atos, Montpellier University Hospital, and others as references.
The headline deployment is Nscale’s NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra AI infrastructure at Start Campus in Portugal, signaling big AI GPU footprints and power-hungry campuses are coming to European soil.
The piece is worth a read for how a major vendor is aligning its data center and GPU roadmap to Europe’s sovereignty agenda and regulatory trajectory.
Source: Reflections from Europe: Sovereign AI is Powering Up | Dell
