Irish start-up invests in Nvidia Blackwell GPUs as demand grows for privacy-first AI platforms among regulated sectors.
A new Irish AI infrastructure business called TensorX has launched with an €8m seed funding round led by Darius Cubed Ventures.
The funding positions TensorX to capitalise on rising demand for sovereign AI services across Europe.
“Demand for sovereign AI infrastructure is outpacing supply across Europe”
The business was founded by entrepreneur Shane Morton and is building a privacy-first AI inference platform designed to keep sensitive enterprise data within European jurisdiction.
The company has already committed €4m to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, including the latest B300 chips, with further investment planned as part of a broader €100m infrastructure rollout.
TensorX is an Irish AI infrastructure company providing private, sovereign inference on dedicated Nvidia GPUs. With zero data retention and hardware on EU-sovereign infrastructure in Dublin and Helsinki, TensorX enables regulated industries to deploy advanced AI in full compliance with GDPR and the EU AI Act. The company supports 33+ open-source models.
Moving at market speed
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
TensorX was born from a practical problem. Shane Morton built and sold financial trading software before acquiring ICT Services, one of Ireland’s leading data centre infrastructure companies.
Through his portfolio of fintech companies, Morton kept hearing the same thing: they wanted to adopt AI but needed certainty that their data would stay within European jurisdiction.
Morton has committed €4 million to the latest Nvidia hardware, with €2 million already delivered and a further €2 million on order, leveraging ICT’s long-standing procurement networks to secure allocation on chips in short supply globally.
“Demand for sovereign AI infrastructure is outpacing supply across Europe,” said Shane Morton, founder of Darius Cubed Ventures. “We’re seeing it directly from enterprises in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Nordics. Our €8m investment is the opening move. There is a far bigger buildout to come, and the infrastructure partnerships we have in Ireland mean we can move at the speed this market demands.”
Demand for sovereign AI infrastructure is accelerating. According to Accenture, 62% of European organisations are now seeking sovereign AI solutions, rising to 76% in banking.
Gartner forecasts that by 2030, 75% of European enterprises will move AI workloads to local providers. European AI spending is projected to reach $144.6 billion by 2028 (IDC). This shift is already playing out at company level.
What are you inferring?
AI inference, the real-time computing that powers every chatbot, coding assistant and AI agent, is becoming one of the most valuable parts of the AI stack.
But for European enterprises, it comes with a growing risk: sensitive data leaving their control. For companies in finance, healthcare and law, that can mean proprietary data being retained or reused by third-party providers, in direct conflict with GDPR and the EU AI Act.
TensorX addresses this by running open-source models on dedicated Nvidia GPUs with zero data retention. Nothing is stored, logged or reused, giving enterprises full control over where their data lives and how it’s used.
The US CLOUD Act lets American authorities compel any US-headquartered cloud provider, including AWS, Microsoft and Google, to hand over customer data regardless of where it physically lives, often under gag orders that prevent the European customer from ever being told.
“European companies don’t want to make a political statement about their AI stack. They want to make a practical one,” said Tim Grant, executive chair of TensorX. “Their data has to stay in Europe, on infrastructure they can trust, under laws they are required to comply with. This is what TensorX was built from, from the chips up. We’re excited to grow this team to power our ambitions to scale rapidly.”
“TensorX turbo-charged the output of our development team and enabled us to deploy our own AI coding assistant,” said Usman Khan, founder of APEX:E3, a London-based capital markets software company. “TensorX is simply the only platform we trust with our most sensitive data which we manage on behalf of regulated institutional financial services companies.”
Top image: (From top left to right) Tim Grant, Nicole Morton, Shane Morton, Craig Donnelly, and (Bottom left to right) PJ Impey, Tom Cooney, Anthony Fildes, Dylan Rodrigues and Jason Sun
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