Speedata has entered the European sovereign infrastructure arena through a strategic partnership with Nebul, marking the first commercial deployment of its Analytics Processing Unit (APU) inside a European sovereign cloud environment. The move positions both companies at the center of Europe’s accelerating push to reconcile AI performance with jurisdictional control.
Nebul will integrate Speedata’s purpose-built APU into its European-owned private AI Neocloud infrastructure, giving enterprises the ability to run high-performance analytics and AI data workloads without transferring data to hyperscale providers operating under foreign legal regimes. As European AI demand intensifies, the infrastructure layer, not the model layer has become the strategic battleground.
Notably, European AI data center demand tripled in 2025, forcing providers to scale aggressively. However, enterprises face a structural dilemma: performance often requires reliance on hyperscale platforms whose ownership and legal exposure sit outside European jurisdiction. Consequently, sovereignty now shapes procurement decisions as much as compute density.
A Processor Built for Apache Spark and the Data Layer
Speedata’s APU introduces a distinct architectural approach. Unlike general-purpose CPUs and GPUs, the processor executes Apache Spark SQL natively in silicon. It runs complex queries, joins, aggregations, and transformations directly in hardware, rather than relying on memory-bound software execution. As a result, it targets one of AI infrastructure’s most persistent bottlenecks: the data layer.
In benchmark environments, the APU has demonstrated performance gains of up to 100x compared to traditional CPU and GPU configurations. Moreover, it works alongside those processors, accelerating data preparation, ETL pipelines, and real-time query-oriented retrieval frameworks such as RAG and Table-Oriented Generation (TAG). This architecture shortens time-to-insight while reducing infrastructure overhead.
Nebul will host the APU across its European data center footprint, powered by renewable energy. Through its Data Platform, Nebul will offer APU-enabled analytics as a sovereign, high-performance service tailored for EMEA enterprises operating in governance-sensitive sectors.
Sovereignty as Infrastructure Strategy
The partnership reframes sovereignty from compliance narrative to infrastructure design principle. By combining Speedata’s analytics accelerator with Nebul’s European ownership structure and operational control, enterprises gain measurable performance advantages without relinquishing legal jurisdiction over their data.
“Running advanced analytics at scale has always been extremely costly. The APU changes that equation,” said Adi Gelvan, CEO of Speedata. “In one enterprise AI data preprocessing deployment, customers replaced 38 servers with just 3, achieving over 90% cost reduction. With Speedata on Nebul’s sovereign cloud, European enterprises can lower their infrastructure and operational costs while keeping their data under European governance.”
Meanwhile, Nebul’s leadership underscores that governance extends beyond geography.
“Sovereignty isn’t a value statement; it’s an operational requirement,” said Arnold Juffer, CEO of Nebul. “True data sovereignty extends beyond GDPR compliance and EU-based data centers to encompass ownership structure, operational control, and jurisdictional authority. Our customers need to know who owns their infrastructure, who operates it, and who can be compelled to access it. With Speedata, we can now add high-performance data processing performance to that offer.”
Strategic Implications for EMEA Enterprises
Initially, the partnership will target EMEA enterprises in sectors where analytics performance and governance obligations intersect, financial services, public sector institutions, healthcare, and regulated industries. These organizations increasingly demand infrastructure that aligns compute acceleration with sovereign control frameworks. Therefore, the collaboration signals more than a hardware deployment. It reflects a broader shift in Europe’s AI strategy where acceleration must coexist with autonomy, and where silicon-level innovation underpins digital sovereignty.
As European sovereign cloud architectures mature, infrastructure providers that control both jurisdiction and performance will define the next phase of AI expansion across the region.
