Falk Weinreich on the Shift to Sovereign Data Centres

Speaking with BizClik Studio at Data Centre LIVE, Falk Weinreich, CEO of Portus Data Centers, argued that inference workloads are creating demand for regional data centres that combine lower latency with greater control over data.

That shift, he says, is making cities beyond the traditional FLAP markets more attractive.

Portus Data Centers' CEO said: "We have data centres in three markets – Hamburg campus, Munich campus, and the Luxembourg campus.

"It's really about data centres providing services to people, customers, organisations who want to be sovereign in a way.

"So data sovereignty is a big driver and AI is a big driver. And these use cases are getting more to the edge of the markets. So tier two, tier three markets – closer to where the customer needs the data.

"So it's not necessarily FLAP anymore. That's a good market too. But there are more markets in Europe and that's where we are investing."

AI inference is changing deployment strategies

Falk sees AI developing along two distinct paths. Large-scale training clusters will continue to be built where energy is cheapest, particularly across the Nordics, but inference workloads present a different challenge.

"Basically there are two main pillars on AI. One is the training and modelling for data centres," he said.

"The impact is rather important in the Nordics. So in Europe at least, people want very good, cheap energy costs, they want cheap facilities. And the distance to where you actually need it is not that critical.

"The other pillar of AI is inference. So the data needs to be connected to the IT – AI models need to speak to the rest of your IT use cases.

"So that's where we come and play. We see a big trend also for more sovereign AI topics."

Weinreich said some organisations are seeking alternatives to large American and Chinese platforms because European regulations, including GDPR, can make sovereign infrastructure a better fit for certain use cases.

"Plus they want to have it close to where their factories are, where their businesses are. So that's why we invest in markets like Hamburg, Luxembourg, Munich – and there will be more coming soon," he added.

"These are very strong economies where there's a lot of IT happening and they need AI to serve their businesses as close as possible to where they need it."

Sovereignty extends beyond AI

While AI is accelerating demand, Falk believes concerns around digital sovereignty are also reshaping cloud strategies.

"This is a big driver. One is obviously the more technical driver: latency. So you want to have it close to your business. But the sovereignty piece is a big one too," he said.

He claimed that the impact extends well beyond AI, as even traditional cloud is reshaping.

"So in the past everything went to a highly scalable, let's say American market leader – AWS, Azure and so forth, one of those clouds – and they are located in the typical FLAP markets: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris.

However, Falk said concerns around legislation such as the Cloud Act and Patriot Act are prompting some organisations to reconsider where workloads are hosted.

"So they rethink, and some of these workloads are moving more into the private cloud environment. So they get virtualised and cloudified, but on-premise or in the data centre of the customer's choice, which is more tied to their IT use cases."

He added that hyperscalers are also responding with more localised deployment options, "like Outposts from AWS, or OCI from Oracle Cloud, or Google has a use case with the German defence."

Building for mixed workloads

Falk said that operators must balance the demands of inference with those of existing enterprise workloads.

"The big question is how much of your data centre you will build towards inference use cases, while you still have traditional cloud workloads which maybe are only ten kilowatts per rack. So we are building for multi use cases.

"Certain data halls will be designed for liquid cooling only. But we are also building traditionally, not two or three kilowatts per rack, more like ten. So it will be a mix of air-cooled and liquid-cooled."