Cloudian & NVIDIA enable sovereign AI solutions in ANZ region

Cloudian has announced a new integration with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to enable organisations in Australia and New Zealand to deploy sovereign AI solutions with full control over their data.

The integration involves Cloudian's HyperScale AI Data Platform working alongside NVIDIA's AI Enterprise software, aiming to assist governments, enterprises, and service providers in meeting national regulations on data sovereignty and governance. The solution supports the deployment of full-stack AI initiatives where all data and models remain within national borders, addressing requirements for compliance with local privacy and future AI laws.

Organisations globally are seeking sovereign AI solutions to ensure their data and AI models comply with country-specific regulations and never leave domestic jurisdiction. Sectors such as government, financial services, health care, and regional service providers are now building AI infrastructures that they claim offer the performance of major cloud platforms while adhering to strict sovereignty controls for sensitive information.

Michael Tso, Chief Executive Officer at Cloudian, explained the concept behind sovereign AI and the company's contribution, stating:

Sovereign AI represents the next evolution of AI deployment, where organisations can harness the full power of artificial intelligence without compromising data control or regulatory compliance. Our HyperScale AI Data Platform enables organisations to deploy complete sovereign AI infrastructure that transforms institutional knowledge into actionable intelligence while maintaining absolute control over their most valuable asset - their data.

The Cloudian solution is based on two integrated platforms working with NVIDIA's AI software stack. The first, HyperStore, offers S3-compatible on-premises data management. The company states that this ensures sensitive information remains within controlled geographic boundaries while providing APIs and performance suitable for AI workloads. The HyperStore system's features include S3 API compatibility, remote direct memory access (RDMA) for high throughput, government-verified security credentials, and air-gapped deployment options for highly controlled environments.

The second component, HyperScale AI Data Platform, leverages NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and aligns with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design. Cloudian describes this platform as automatically converting enterprise data stores into AI-ready resources, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure layers. It incorporates vector database technology to ingest, index, and retrieve unstructured content-including documents, multimedia, and other records-which often make up the majority of enterprise knowledge assets.

Together, these platforms reportedly allow organisations to use their unstructured data-constituting around 90% of all enterprise information-while keeping all data and models under national or organisational control.

Traditional AI deployments frequently require building complex, dedicated stacks for compute, storage, and database processing, a process which can be costly and demand specialist skills. Cloudian positions its HyperScale platform as reducing these requirements, bringing accelerated AI capabilities directly to native S3-compatible data sources and enabling AI agents to analyse organisational knowledge in near real-time with maintained sovereignty controls.

Australian and regional perspectives

Christopher Sassone, Head of Sales at ResetData, an Australian partner and AI services provider, addressed the relevance of the solution to local data protection requirements:

Australia's Privacy Act and upcoming AI governance regulations require us to keep both training data and AI models within Australian borders. We understand that sovereignty is essential to trust, and our technology partners provide the performance we need to meet strict data sovereignty requirements. We deliver AI-as-a-Service that customers trust to remain compliant with Australian law.

From the infrastructure standpoint, Justin Boitano, Vice President of Enterprise AI Products at NVIDIA, commented on the benefits of the integration for sovereign AI deployments:

Bringing scalable storage and compute infrastructure directly to where data resides is a cornerstone of a successful sovereign AI factory. Cloudian's HyperScale AI Data Platform integrates high-performance storage with NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and software to unlock the value of enterprise data for sovereign AI applications.

Regional adoption of sovereign AI is also underway outside Australia and New Zealand. Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Yotta Data Services, spoke about the importance of the platform for the Indian market:

Cloudian has been instrumental in enabling our sovereign AI initiatives across India. The HyperStore platform allows us to build scalable AI models using our local data while ensuring everything remains within Indian borders. Our customers can now deploy AI applications with complete confidence in data sovereignty.

Pramod Bhandiwad, Head of AI and Software Development at Sify Technologies in India, remarked on the data localisation requirements in regulated sectors:

As India's digital infrastructure backbone serving top banks, the national stock exchange, and critical government systems, data sovereignty is fundamental to our operations. Cloudian's sovereign AI platform enables us to deliver AI-powered services to regulated industries while ensuring sensitive data never leaves Indian territory. This is essential for meeting India's data localisation requirements and maintaining the trust of our enterprise customers.

Logan Lee, Executive Vice President and Head of Cloud at Kakao Enterprise in Korea, discussed the platform's relevance to the Korean national AI strategy:

Korea's national AI strategy demands complete technological sovereignty. Cloudian's platform allows us to build and deploy AI models using Korean data that never leaves our infrastructure. The S3 compatibility means our developers can use familiar tools while maintaining absolute sovereignty control.