SAP is advancing its sovereignty plans with the EU AI Cloud, a setup aimed at consolidating previous efforts under one approach. The goal is simple. It’s about giving European organizations more choice and more control over how they run their AI and cloud services.
Some may prefer SAP’s own data centers, others may want to use a trusted European provider, and others may want to manage everything on-site. The EU AI Cloud is built to support a variety of needs while keeping data local and compliant with EU regulations.
Strengthening AI sovereignty across Europe
SAP is also collaborating with Cohere to offer new agent-style multimodal AI tools to customers through Cohere North. These models are made available through SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and offer industries with rigorous data residency needs a way to incorporate production-ready AI into their daily operations. The companies say their goal is to help companies find better insights, improve decision support and automate complex tasks without giving up control of compliance or performance.
As the Cohere team notes, the work with SAP aims to make advanced AI accessible to organizations that cannot move their data outside of Europe.
SAP is building the EU AI Cloud with the support of various partners in Europe and around the world. Models and applications such as Cohere, Mistral AI, and OpenAI are directly integrated into SAP BTP, giving customers a clearer path to building, deploying, and scaling their AI applications. Businesses can access partner tools as SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS and choose where they run on SAP infrastructure or on approved European partners.
The aim is to give businesses and public sector groups access to the latest AI tools, while staying within European standards on security, data protection and sovereignty.
Deployment options for different security needs
EU AI Cloud operates through SAP Sovereign Cloud, allowing customers to choose the level of control they want across the entire stack, from infrastructure to applications. The AI models run on SAP’s cloud infrastructure and SAP BTP in European data centers, with operational separation from the US hyperscaler.
Deployment options are:
SAP Sovereign Cloud (EU) on SAP Cloud Infrastructure
SAP’s IaaS is based on open source tools and runs within SAP’s European data center network. Data remains within the EU to support compliance with local data protection regulations.
SAP Sovereign Cloud Onsite
The infrastructure is managed by SAP but housed in data centers of the customer’s choice. This setup provides the highest level of control over your data, operational, and legal requirements while maintaining access to SAP’s cloud architecture.
Hyperscalers selected by market
Some customers may still be running SAP commercial SaaS on global cloud providers. As you do so, you can add sovereign features based on local needs.
German sovereign cloud service designed for the public sector. Built to support local rules and help government agencies modernize their digital systems.
EU AI Cloud gives European organizations more choice in how they run their AI and cloud workloads while maintaining control of their data. The combination of deployment options, partner models, and sovereign design is intended to support enterprises facing strict rules around privacy, storage, and operational monitoring.
For businesses and public organizations that require AI systems built around local requirements, SAP’s approach provides a way to use advanced tools without abandoning the safeguards they rely on.
(Photo provided by Antoine Schibler)
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