Speedata to Enter European Sovereign Cloud Market
Speedata, creator of an Analytics Processing Unit (APU), has partnered with Nebul to offer its big data and AI analytics acceleration in the European sovereign cloud market. The move reflects a trend toward building silicon for specific regional compliance and data residency requirements.
- Speedata's Analytics Processing Unit (APU) is a custom ASIC designed to accelerate Apache Spark SQL workloads by executing complex queries, joins, and transformations directly on the silicon. This approach targets the data layer bottleneck, offering performance gains of up to 100x over traditional CPUs and GPUs in standard benchmarks. - The partnership with Nebul marks the first commercial deployment of Speedata's APU in a European cloud environment, specifically targeting the growing demand for sovereign AI infrastructure. European demand for AI data center capacity reportedly tripled in 2025. - Nebul provides a "sovereign AI cloud" that adheres to European data governance regulations like GDPR, the EU AI Act, and NIS2, ensuring that customer data remains under European legal authority. This addresses concerns about data access by foreign governments when using hyperscale cloud providers. - In a production use case for AI data preprocessing, a customer was able to replace 38 servers with just three servers equipped with Speedata's APU, resulting in a 90% reduction in infrastructure costs. Beyond traditional ETL, the APU is designed to accelerate AI data preparation and real-time query-oriented RAG and TAG (Table Oriented Generation) for LLMs. - Speedata, an Israeli startup founded in 2019, has raised a total of $114 million, with a Series B round of $44 million in June 2025. Its strategic investors include Lip-Bu Tan, former CEO of Cadence Design Systems and a key figure at Intel, and Eyal Waldman, co-founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies. - Nebul, a Netherlands-based company founded in 2022, is an NVIDIA Elite Cloud Service Provider that operates green-energy data centers across Europe and was named a 2025 Gartner Cool Vendor. - The Speedata APU is built on a custom chip named "Callisto" and integrates with Apache Spark's Catalyst optimizer via its "Dash" software stack, which automatically offloads compute-intensive tasks to the hardware without requiring changes to existing applications.
