Earlier this week, TensorX raised €8m in a seed funding round, which its founder Shane Morton described as an ‘opening move’ ahead of a much larger build-out.

Irish AI infrastructure company TensorX is to collaborate with finance provider Solstice in a partnership to deliver up to $1bn-worth of sovereign European AI infrastructure.

The companies said they “will work together to create a facility … to finance AI hardware and data centre build-out to meet rising demand for sovereign compute across the EU”.

Dublin-based TensorX buys and runs AI hardware and data centre capacity across the EU, with the aim of connecting its start-up and enterprise clients to private compute and keeping “prompts and data on European infrastructure with full data residency and zero retention”.

Solstice is described as “an on-chain settlement and yield protocol and part of the Deus X Capital ecosystem”.

“Europe wants AI that can run on its own terms, on its own soil, without handing its data to someone else’s cloud on the world stage,” said Tim Grant, the chair of TensorX.

“Meeting that accelerating demand takes hardware, and a lot of it. The billion dollars going into GPUs and data centre capacity is the first step, and we expect to keep buying as demand grows. Solstice gives us a financing partner that can keep pace with this incredibly fast-moving market.”

Relatedly, Solstice will launch a yield asset named ‘aiUSX’ to help companies finance AI build-outs using capital they already hold.

“Every company is turning into an AI company, and every one of them watches its inference bill climb,” said Ben Nadareski, CEO of Solstice.

“aiUSX puts the money they set aside for AI to work in the meantime. They get access to the kind of AI-infrastructure lending that used to sit with large institutions, the capital stays liquid, and what it earns goes toward inference later.”

Earlier this week, TensorX raised €8m in a seed funding round with the goal of further contributing to European plans for sovereign AI infrastructure, which its founder Shane Morton described as an “opening move” ahead of a much larger build-out.

The EU is concerned about the control US technology companies wield over the bloc’s technology infrastructure and data.

“European companies don’t want to make a political statement about their AI stack. They want to make a practical one,” said Grant earlier this week. “Their data has to stay in Europe, on infrastructure they can trust, under laws they are required to comply with.”

Data from Accenture suggests that 62pc of European organisations seek sovereign AI, while 75pc of European enterprises plan to move AI workloads to local providers by 2030, according to Gartner.

“Sovereign AI is one of the biggest infrastructure build-outs of this decade, and it runs on capital as much as it runs on chips,” said Stuart Connolly of Deus X Capital.

“TensorX builds the compute, Solstice brings the financing and aiUSX lets more companies take part in funding it.”

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