Residency is not sovereignty.
A region label in a console tells you where the disk sits. It does not tell you which government can compel the operator. For a growing number of European and American institutions, that distinction is now the whole procurement decision.
The uncomfortable fact underneath most sovereign cloud marketing: the US CLOUD Act reaches US-headquartered cloud providers globally, including the sovereign-branded European offerings. Data residency and data sovereignty are different things, and most European commitments deliver only the first.
Strata's answer is structural rather than contractual. European workloads run on a European site operated by the European arm. American workloads run in Texas. Neither is a configuration setting.
The three questions that decide procurement
| Question | What most vendors can say | What Strata says |
|---|---|---|
| Where does the data go? | A region, selectable in a console | A named industrial site: Fredericia, Denmark or Stanton, Texas. You can visit it |
| Who else can reach it? | Logical separation on shared infrastructure | Nobody. Dedicated accelerators, dedicated network, dedicated storage, per tenant |
| Whose law reaches the operator? | Usually United States law, whatever the region label says | The law of the jurisdiction you selected, through the entity that operates that site |
| Whose model is it? | The vendor's, on the vendor's upgrade schedule | Yours to choose. Model-agnostic, open weights, pinned to a version you approve |
The European market is repricing this
European sovereign cloud is forecast to grow from just over EUR 20bn of annual revenue today to over EUR 100bn by 2031. That is not a privacy preference; it is procurement policy hardening across member states.
At the same time, the EU AI Act and the Data Act are adding governance obligations on where models run, how they are documented and who can access training and inference data. Every one of those obligations is easier to evidence on a single-tenant site than on a shared endpoint.
Our position is deliberately narrow. We are not trying to be a European hyperscaler. We are offering a small amount of genuinely sovereign capacity to institutions for whom the alternative is doing nothing.
On open weights and where they come from
- Several of the strongest open-weight models are published by non-United States laboratories, and government scrutiny of their use is increasing on both sides of the Atlantic.
- Strata sells the enclave, the operations and the domain layer. The weights are a component, and a swappable one.
- We maintain qualified builds across multiple model families and origins, and will run whichever your policy permits — including United States-origin only, or European-origin only, where that is the requirement.
- No part of this business depends on one laboratory, one country or one license. That is a design decision, not a reaction.
What we commit to in writing
- No training on your data, no fine-tuning on your data for any other customer, and no use of your content to improve any model or service.
- No retention of prompts, completions or context beyond the operational window you define, with destruction certified on termination.
- Processing confined to the site and jurisdiction named in your agreement, with no silent subprocessor additions.
- Access by Strata personnel only through a logged, time-bound path that you can review and revoke.
- A right to audit, exercisable by you or an independent third party of your choosing.
Bring us the clause that blocked your last project.
Genuinely. If a legal or regulatory constraint stopped an AI initiative, send it over. Designing to those constraints is the entire business.