“Inherent sovereignty is a fallacy … we’re talking more about operational sovereignty.”

That’s the view of Wojciech Stramski, chief executive of Beyond.pl, who spoke at this week’s Everpure Accelerate London event at Tobacco Dock.

Beyond.pl has spent more than two decades as a Polish colocation and managed cloud provider, serving about 500 customers and drawing about 30% of its traditional revenue from the wider European market. Last year it deployed what it calls central and eastern Europe’s first commercial AI factory, which paired Nvidia DGX SuperPOD compute with 3PB of Everpure FlashBlade//S500 R2 storage on the company’s 100MW campus in Poznań. 

Stramski said the datacentre – marketed as an AI factory – runs at a power usage effectiveness of 1.2, against a regional peer average of around 1.5, and ranks among the top 500 supercomputers globally. It plans to scale up in the first half of next year, with plans to add four times its current graphics processing unit (GPU) capacity as it moves from B200 to B300 and GB300 Nvidia GPUs, and integrates the B300 with its existing Everpure storage.

Stramski’s argument is that sovereignty is less about where data physically sits than who can reach it. For European organisations, he said, the real sovereignty risk is the US and its hyperscalers, not Russia. But he noted there is, for now, no real alternative to US hardware such as Nvidia’s.

That tension plays out in an unexpected way in Poznań. “The majority of the customers, actually US customers, were inbounding into the factory to deliver sovereign services for their European base,” he said.

Beyond.pl reassures its own customers on the basis that it cannot see their data, and collects only telemetry from the infrastructure. Stramski said that, as a Polish entity governed by Polish and European Union law, the US government cannot compel the company to hand over customer data. That distinction, he argued, is what makes the offering genuinely sovereign in operational terms, even while the silicon underneath remains American.

The wider context is a European push to rebuild domestic capacity. Beyond.pl participates in European Commission initiatives, including the AI Gigafactories programme to deploy five or six sovereign AI factories for the EU, though Stramski conceded the region’s cloud alternatives are not yet as advanced as the US hyperscalers.

Poland’s appeal, he said, is time to market. “Time to market is now the key element for AI,” said Stramski.

The country has only around 200MW of live datacentre capacity right now, but, he said, it also has the biggest energy construction programme in Europe, and it can permit a project in two or three years, against three to five years in Iberia and Scandinavia. Beyond.pl also plans to feed 60MW of recovered heat from its Poznań campus into the city’s district heating network, which Stramski noted is the second largest in Europe after Germany’s.

He said the sovereignty conversation only began in earnest about 18 months ago, and is now trickling down from banks and healthcare into manufacturing, logistics and retail. Yet, he conceded, the demand picture remains uneven: European enterprises’ appetite for AI capacity is, in his view, very small, with AI labs and hyperscalers taking up much of the factory’s compute rather than the region’s own businesses.