NetApp has announced a new partnership with Emma Technologies (emma), which will see the pair deliver sovereign AI for European businesses.
The joint venture combines NetApp’s high-performance storage capabilities with emma’s GPU capacity and cloud operations platform for distributed architecture to create a single sovereign AI stack.
The new offering aims to provide organizations across the continent with sovereign AI infrastructure that doesn’t lock them into a single cloud platform.
In an announcement, Willem Hendrickx, NetApp’s senior vice president and general manager for EMEA and LATAM, said the move will help prevent European enterprises having to choose between AI innovation and data sovereignty.
"emma is building exactly the kind of next-generation sovereign cloud infrastructure that the European market needs,” he said. “With the NetApp Platform at its core, we are helping emma build the Intelligent Data Infrastructure it needs to make its vision a reality.”
Enterprise software vendor emma’s cloud platform enables organizations to manage workloads across hyperscalers, regional and sovereign clouds, as well as AI-optimized providers and on-premises environments.
The firm also operates its own high-performance AI infrastructure in European data centers to help businesses retain control over their data, costs, and compliance without being constrained by vendor lock-in.
emma said its cloud-agnostic platform will help European organizations balance the running of high-performance, data-intensive AI workloads with the need to meet strict data sovereignty goals.
The NetApp Platform – which includes high-performance AI storage powered by the company’s ONTAP software – will provide both file and object storage within a single architecture to support emma’s multi-tenant AI environment.
The companies said the combined offering will provide data protection and cyber resilience while enabling the movement of workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments in line with emma’s flexible deployment strategy.
"The conversation with European customers has changed,” commented Dmitry Panenkov, founder and CEO of emma. “They no longer ask whether to run AI, but where they can run it without losing control of their data. With NetApp, we can give them a clear answer."