Podcast Ep 354: After recently raising €8m to build Europe’s sovereign AI infrastructure, Tim Grant from TensorX explains why European businesses want their AI infrastructure stay inside EU borders.
In June we reported how an Irish AI infrastructure business called TensorX 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.
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.
“It took a minute for financial services to wake up and realise it was going to need sovereign AI, and I think we were quite far ahead of it”
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.
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.
The next phase of the AI boom
We spoke with TensorX’s executive chair Tim Grant who said that the next phase of the AI boom will be decided not by which model businesses use, but where that model’s data actually sits.
Grant is also the chair of Apex E3, a company that works with major institutional asset managers including Vanguard, the world’s second largest asset manager. It was that work that surfaced the problem that TensorX now exists to solve.
“We were very quickly going to hit a brick wall when it came to the data, where it was going, who could see it, and how that would fly with the policies and procedures that exist at these large asset managers.”
Grant puts this instinct down to a career spent in financial services, an industry long accustomed to strict data retention rules under regulations that include GDPR.
He says what caught the industry off guard was AI itself. “It took a minute for financial services to wake up and realise it was going to need sovereign AI, and I think we were quite far ahead of it.”
He explained: “My day job is CEO of Deus Ex Capital. We run a very significant sized fund which invests and builds and operates. One of those companies that we’ve invested in is called Apex E3. Apex has been around for several years, and Apex was the reason we realised that TensorX would be needed.”
Apex became the first client of TensorX and the €8m funding that was raised is for building out the team to build the infrastructure as well as buy and deploy GPUs to build that layer that lets clients achieve sovereign capability.
Grant places TensorX inside a wider shift that he calls the ‘rise of the Neo Clouds’. These are a newer breed of infrastructure provider distinct from cloud giants like Amazon or Google.
TensorX is a Neo Cloud that has been built from day one for sovereignty to address the concern large institutions like banks have for where their data sits in the age of AI.
He said that where the classic cloud offers GPU capacity at a cost and without a clear answer to where the data centre actually is, TensorX can demonstrate that the hardware, software and all of the data stay in Dublin. It can also demonstrate that its models are not trained on client data unless a client specifically requires it.
Grant frames sovereign AI as a direct extension of data sovereignty rules that financial services and healthcare firms already live by, but applied to a wider set of businesses. “We are using a data centre in Dublin and we have access to others around Europe. The long-term goal is to have our own data centres over time. But in the short term the machines are running in the jurisdictions that you need them to run in. The Dublin location is great because offers the entirety of the EU. We can serve any client in the EU and guarantee that the hardware sits in Dublin, that the software is run only in Dublin.
From the perspective of company boards, Grant says: “What I need to know is where my data goes, who can see it, that it’s not persisted somewhere that I don’t know where that is, and I need to be able to audit that.”
He said the recent situation where a new version of Anthropic’s Claude was temporarily unavailable outside the US sharpened boardroom thinking. “Suddenly you can’t use that model anymore. That’s a business continuity risk.
Asked whether digital sovereignty is a security issue, an economic one or a geopolitical one, Grant says it is all three and links it directly to the organisational change that AI is forcing on companies.
Ireland’s deep pool of technology talent and its EU membership make the country a strong beachhead for the entire European market. Electricity and its cost, however, remain the biggest long term impediment to building next generation data centres at scale.
“Dublin’s a great place to build the business out into the EU. That’s precisely our plan.”
Grant concludes that sovereignty and AI adoption are not side issues for European businesses. They are strategic questions that boards need to be asking now.
TensorX’s pitch is straightforward: European companies that want the benefits of AI without handing control of their data to infrastructure that they cannot audit will need sovereignty built in.
“If you take that time, engage, understand sovereignty and what it might mean to you, understand what AI might do for your firm, you’ll find very quickly that there’s a source of incredible opportunity to go and do things you couldn’t do before.”
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