TensorX raises €8M to build sovereign AI infrastructure keeping European data in Europe

TensorX raises €8M to build sovereign AI inference for Europe on Nvidia Blackwell

The Irish startup is buying B300 GPUs to expand a GDPR-compliant inference platform aimed at the banks, hospitals, and law firms that cannot send their data abroad. TensorX, a startup building AI inference infrastructure that keeps European data inside Europe, has raised €8m to buy Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, including the latest B300 chips, and expand a platform pitched squarely at regulated industries. The money goes into hardware rather than headcount. TensorX runs private AI inference on dedicated Nvidia infrastructure located in Europe, currently from data centres in Dublin and Helsinki, and lets customers deploy open-weight models without their data leaving the continent. Nothing, the company says, is retained, reused, or fed back into training. The platform supports more than 33 open-weight models and offers an OpenAI-compatible API, so developers can switch over with minimal code changes. The pitch grew out of a recurring complaint. TensorX founder Shane Morton, who came from a portfolio of fintech companies, kept hearing the same thing from businesses that wanted to adopt AI but needed certainty their data would stay under European jurisdiction. For a bank, a hospital, or a law firm, data residency is not a preference but a regulatory obligation, and one that an American-hosted service struggles to satisfy regardless of where its servers physically sit, because of the reach of US law over US-owned providers. That argument has been sharpened by recent events. TensorX points to the "Anthropic Fable 5 situation" as evidence of how fast trust assumptions in AI infrastructure can shift, a reference to the US government's order, earlier in June, that Anthropic suspend access to its most capable model on national-security grounds. For European firms watching a top model pulled by a foreign government overnight, the case made the abstract risk of depending on someone else's stack feel concrete. The demand signals TensorX cites are not its own. It points to Accenture research finding that 62% of European organisations are seeking sovereign AI solutions, a figure that rises among Irish and German firms and is higher still in banking, and to a Gartner forecast that more than three-quarters of European and Middle Eastern enterprises will move workloads into geopolitically lower-risk arrangements by 2030. The company also cites projections that European AI spending will reach about $144.6bn by 2028. The thesis is that the appetite is already here and the supply of compliant compute has not caught up. Whether a sovereign label settles the question is itself contested. TNW has argued that the rented-GPU model can reinforce the illusion of European AI sovereignty when the underlying chips, designs, and supply chains still run through American and Asian vendors. TensorX is a member of the Nvidia Inception programme and sources its hardware through Dell, which is to say its sovereign offering is built on a decidedly non-European silicon stack. That is less a contradiction than the prevailing shape of the market: Nvidia's sprawling equity bets and its hold on high-end accelerators mean almost every European sovereignty play, TensorX included, runs on American silicon at the bottom of the stack. The sovereignty on offer is over data and jurisdiction, not over the hardware itself. On the commercial side, TensorX says it is already generating revenue, with customers across finance, healthcare, and legal services, named clients including APEX, TradeLocker, and Cor Prime, and developer demand routed in through the aggregator OpenRouter. Those figures are company-stated and unaudited. The financing itself comes from Darius Cubed Ventures, which has committed €6.5m toward Nvidia hardware through Dell, with €1.5m delivered and a further €5m on order; the company says it is in advanced talks on additional financing. The expansion plan stretches beyond the two existing sites, with GPU capacity planned across Ireland, the UK, Germany, France, and the Nordics, ahead of the EU AI Act's tightening compliance rules for regulated sectors. Demand, TensorX says, is already outpacing supply.

Ireland's TensorX bags €8m to build sovereign AI infrastructure

TensorX runs open-source models on Nvidia GPUs with zero data retention. Irish start-up TensorX has raised €8m in a seed round to help further Europe in its plans for sovereign AI infrastructure. Founded by Shane Morton, TensorX is committing the funds to procure Nvidia Blackwell GPUs for its EU AI inference platform, which runs on dedicated hardware in Dublin and Helsinki. Morton raised the funds via his investment vehicle Darius Cubed Venture. He is committing €4m towards the latest Nvidia hardware. "Demand for sovereign AI infrastructure is outpacing supply across Europe," said Morton. "We're seeing it directly from enterprises in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Nordics." Morton built and sold financial trading software, before acquiring ICT Services, an Irish data centre infrastructure provider. "Our €8m investment is the opening move. There is a far bigger buildout to come, and the infrastructure partnerships we have in Ireland mean we can move at the speed this market demands," he said. The EU is concerned over the control US technology companies wield over the bloc's technology infrastructure and data. Over the years, its attempts to regulate US Big Tech firms have worsened tensions between the EU and the US, even eliciting threats of further tariffs from president Donald Trump. Earlier this month, the bloc lost access to Anthropic's leading AI models Mythos and Fable after a US export control directive. An EU spokesperson said that the move cemented why Europe needs to strengthen its technological sovereignty. EU businesses are reportedly sharing the concerns, with data from Accenture suggesting that 62pc of European organisations seek sovereign AI, while 75pc plan to move AI workloads to local providers by 2030, according to Gartner. Meanwhile, the possibility of the US government compelling US tech companies to share EU data adds to the bloc's growing problems. AI inference is vital to the AI stack, but poses data security concerns. For companies in finance, healthcare and law, sensitive data could be retained or reused by third-party providers against EU regulations. TensorX attempts to address this by running open-source models on dedicated Nvidia GPUs with zero data retention. "Nothing is stored, logged or reused, giving enterprises full control over where their data lives and how it's used," the Dublin-headquartered company said. "European companies don't want to make a political statement about their AI stack. They want to make a practical one," said Tim Grant, TensorX's chair. "Their data has to stay in Europe, on infrastructure they can trust, under laws they are required to comply with. The company is also in advanced talks to tap further financing to expand its European footprint, with capacity planned for Ireland, the UK, Germany, France and the Nordics. It has plans to deploy up to €100m in Blackwell GPUs. TensorX is a part of Nvidia's Inception programme - a free initiative that guides AI start-ups through the chipmaker's platform and ecosystem. It partnered with long-term Nvidia partner Dell to source the GPU hardware. According to TensorX, the company has already generated revenue across large regulated enterprises, partnership channels that route developer demand onto GPU compute, and SMEs building their own AI products on top of the company's platform. The company employs 14 people, Grant told the Business Post. It plans to hire six new workers, with most, if not all, based out of Dublin. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.