Separate data spaces
Tenant separation at infrastructure, model and application level; no mixing of training or usage data.
The sovereignty dilemma of mid-sized companies
Operating AI models in your own data centre means investing in hardware, energy, specialist staff and ongoing model maintenance. For a single company with modest token volume that rarely pays off. The alternative — everything via external providers — raises questions about data protection, contract terms, price changes and dependence.
Both extremes can be calculated with the Sellium TCO model. Usually it shows: the economically and legally best point lies in the middle.
What Shared Sovereignty means
Several companies — along a supply chain, in a region or in an association — jointly use AI infrastructure in Europe: compute capacity, models, operation. Each company keeps separate data spaces, its own access rules and its own fine-tuning. Costs and operation are shared, not data.
Shared models
Open models, jointly operated and maintained; company-specific adaptations stay with the respective company.
European operation
Data centres and operators in the EU, clear contract terms, data processing under GDPR.
Exit capability
Data, configurations and adaptations remain portable — switching or bringing them back in-house remains possible.
Governance: who decides what
Shared infrastructure needs clear rules: who decides on model changes, updates and capacity expansions? How are costs distributed? How are security incidents handled? We shape this governance with the participants — as an operating agreement between the companies, with defined roles and escalation paths.
- Steering committee of the participating companies with fixed decision rules
- Transparent cost allocation by usage
- Security and compliance standards (ISO 27001, TISAX) as the common basis
- Documentation under the EU AI Act per company and use case
Who Shared Sovereignty is for
For companies that process sensitive data and still want to use AI productively; for supply chains in which several partners have similar requirements; for associations, clusters and regions that want to offer their members a common basis; and for companies that deliberately want to become more independent of individual providers.
What Sellium contributes
We plan the architecture, calculate the variants with the TCO model, shape the governance and accompany set-up and operation — vendor-neutral and with a view to the participants' concrete use cases. Where it makes sense, we work with European data centre and model partners.