Accenture has expanded its AI Refinery platform in Europe to incorporate new sovereign and agentic AI capabilities aimed at helping organisations retain control over critical data while accelerating the deployment of innovative AI solutions. This move aligns with Europe’s broader ambition to strengthen its economic competitiveness through enhanced productivity and technological resilience.
Rob Knigge, Country Managing Director of Accenture Netherlands, highlighted the significance of this development, noting that AI presents a unique opportunity for Europe to bolster its economy. “With the expansion of our AI Refinery platform, we help European organisations deploy AI agents faster while addressing their sovereignty issues. This enables them to maintain control over their data, which is especially important for the public sector and critical industries such as energy, telecommunications, and defence,” he said.
At the core of the expansion is a sovereign AI architecture designed to meet the increasing demands for comprehensive management of the AI stack—from infrastructure to data and applications. Roy Ikink, Technology Lead at Accenture Netherlands, explained: “With AI Refinery, we offer a platform-based approach that helps organisations build and deploy AI solutions within their own cloud environments, ensuring full control over data residency, security, and platform observability. This way, they can create value and exercise the necessary controls in a rapidly changing market.”
Accenture estimates that by 2030, Europe could constitute up to 30 percent of the global sovereign AI market. The platform leverages NVIDIA Enterprise AI technology and provides AI models customizable to national languages and contexts, hosted securely within national borders. This is particularly crucial for public sectors and industries where data sovereignty is a regulatory and operational imperative.
An illustrative example includes Accenture’s work with a European public utility company to deploy sovereign GPU-as-a-service offerings. This allows access to powerful AI computing resources securely contained within national boundaries without the need for heavy upfront hardware investments, ideally suited for time-sensitive and flexible AI applications.
Beyond digital sovereignty, Accenture’s AI Refinery also enhances operational resilience through Physical AI. European manufacturers, a key economic pillar accounting for roughly a quarter of the region’s GDP, benefit from the platform’s capabilities in robotics, simulation, and digital twins, enabling optimisation of production, warehousing, and supply chains. The introduction of a Physical AI Software Development Kit (SDK) utilising NVIDIA’s Metropolis and AI Blueprint for Video Search and Summarisation exemplifies this approach. A partnership with KION AG is exploring how such technologies can improve safety, productivity, and quality control in production and warehouse automation.
Accenture’s AI Refinery platform is designed for deployment across all public and private cloud platforms and can be integrated with other business units to accelerate AI adoption across SaaS and Cloud AI ecosystems. The platform also supports regulated industries with substantial on-premises infrastructure needs, addressing data sovereignty, security, resiliency, and low-latency operational requirements in collaboration with partners like Dell Technologies.
Furthermore, Accenture has introduced AI Refinery for Industry, a suite of 12 agent solutions tailored to various sectors. These solutions aim to dramatically shorten the time to develop effective AI agents from months to days, enhancing workforce capabilities and addressing industry-specific challenges. This expansion is part of a larger Accenture and NVIDIA collaboration to scale agentic AI functionality and reinvent industrial processes.
On a broader scale, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang has underscored the imperative for Europe to build stronger digital infrastructure to realise the full potential of AI. Speaking at European tech events, he stressed that while Europe boasts rich AI research talent, infrastructure gaps must be addressed to remain competitive globally. This aligns with recent UK government initiatives investing heavily in AI computing capacity to position the country as a global AI leader.
NVIDIA is also actively deploying cutting-edge AI infrastructure across Europe, including partnerships with major industrial players in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, and the UK, demonstrating its commitment to democratising AI and fostering equitable access to next-generation technologies.
In summary, Accenture’s enhancement of its AI Refinery platform reflects a strategic response to Europe’s unique demands for data sovereignty, operational resilience, and rapid innovation in AI. By combining sovereign AI architectures, physical AI innovations, and collaborative industry solutions, Accenture and its partners aim to empower European organisations to maintain control over their data and derive significant competitive advantages amid the accelerating global AI race.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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