The market is big enough. It will be even bigger in the years to come. A new player is launching a so-called 'sovereign' cloud offering in Luxembourg: following a restructuring phase that will reach a new stage in January, NSI Group, which became a support PSF--a regulated service provider for financial firms--in May, has teamed up with IBM to "provide businesses and institutions with a ready-to-use artificial intelligence solution that complies with the strict requirements of data localisation, protection, auditability and security",the company said on 13 November 2024.
The offer comprises two services: on the one hand, an integrated artificial intelligence platform (an AI studio giving access to different models against IBM's Granite, Llama or Mistral, governance and a data integration solution) and, on the other, a catalogue of artificial intelligence tools, such as LLM as a service, augmented generation by retrieval - in other words, private data is supplemented with data retrieved from the internet – and an AskNSI chatbot.
“This major step forward in our range of solutions for the Luxembourg market reinforces our ambition to be the leading player in the digital and new technologies sectors,” commented NSI Luxembourg's managing director, Nathan Mangenot. “The complete mastery of an AI platform, from its hosting to the development of a portfolio of dedicated business services, perfectly illustrates the extent of our know-how within NSI Luxembourg PSF.”
"This collaboration is based on a shared commitment to ethical and transparent AI, guaranteeing end-to-end compliance and security. By joining forces, IBM and NSI will be able to offer customers solutions that are fully adapted to the requirements of the Luxembourg market", stated Mourisco Badiola, director, ecosystem at IBM Belux.
This translates into a locally controlled infrastructure and management tools, with no dependence on proprietary services from these companies, which strengthens control, traceability and data confidentiality, the company told Paperjam. “The data is hosted on servers located exclusively in our Luxembourg data centres [editor’s note: the Tier IV facilities are Luxconnect data centres, a company spokesperson stated after this article was originally published]. This guarantees its protection under Luxembourg law. In this sense, our solution provides technologies and resources under local control, with no data transfers outside local jurisdictions. On the other hand, NSI's sovereign AI offering enables a hybrid deployment of AI between NSI's local infrastructure and that of customers from a data residency and AI processing point of view.”
In January 2025, NSI will become part of CTG and will employ 600 people in Luxembourg at two sites.
Updated Wednesday 13 November at 1:59pm: NSI clarified that it used Luxconnect data centres.
Read the original French-language version of this news report