1. The conversation around data sovereignty in Europe has intensified recently. What’s really driving this shift?
Beyhan Çalışkan:
For a long time, data sovereignty was treated as primarily a regulatory or compliance topic. Today, it has become something much more fundamental.
Organisations are starting to realise that data is not just an asset, it directly impacts operational continuity, competitiveness, and even strategic independence. At the same time, global uncertainty, evolving regulations, and the rapid rise of AI are forcing companies to rethink how and where their data is managed.
The key question has changed. It’s no longer “Are we compliant?”
It’s “Who actually controls the infrastructure we depend on?”
2. The numbers around Europe’s cloud market are quite striking. Around 70% of Europe’s cloud market is controlled by US-based providers, while European vendors account for only about 15% of their own market. How should organisations interpret this level of dependency?
Beyhan Çalışkan:
The numbers tell a very clear story.
Europe has an enormous digital economy, yet most of the cloud infrastructure supporting it is operated by providers headquartered outside the region. US hyperscalers have built highly advanced and widely adopted platforms, which is why they dominate the market today.
But this also reveals something else: Europe still lacks a strong ecosystem of large-scale cloud providers operating on infrastructure fully governed within the region.
That creates more than a competitive imbalance, it creates structural dependency.
Organisations are increasingly building critical systems on infrastructure governed outside their own jurisdiction.
For many companies and public institutions, the discussion is shifting from simple cloud adoption toward a more fundamental question: how Europe can strengthen its own cloud ecosystem and digital infrastructure.
3. At what point does this dependency become a real business risk?
Beyhan Çalışkan:
It becomes a risk when infrastructure stops being just a support layer and becomes the foundation of the business itself.
Today, cloud environments are running core systems: financial services, healthcare platforms, government infrastructure, industrial systems, and increasingly AI workloads. These are not optional systems. They are mission-critical.
When those systems are dependent on infrastructure governed outside your own regulatory or operational environment, the conversation naturally changes. It’s no longer only about performance or cost.
It becomes about control, resilience, and strategic autonomy.
This is why we’re seeing a growing interest in European cloud initiatives and regional infrastructure providers that can operate within Europe’s legal and operational frameworks.
4. AI seems to be accelerating this conversation. What role does it play in reshaping infrastructure decisions?
Beyhan Çalışkan:
AI is accelerating this shift because it dramatically increases both the scale and sensitivity of infrastructure requirements.
Training and running AI models requires massive parallel data access, extremely high throughput, and very consistent low latency. At the same time, these environments concentrate enormous volumes of valuable and often sensitive data.
If your AI infrastructure runs on platforms you do not fully control, the sovereignty question becomes very real very quickly.
AI doesn’t just increase demand for compute and storage.
It also exposes the architectural limitations of infrastructure that was not designed for sustained high-throughput workloads or predictable performance under heavy load.
This is why many organisations are now rethinking the foundational layers of their infrastructure stack, not just the applications running on top of it.
5. Where does NGX Storage fit into this evolving landscape? What is your approach to solving this challenge?
Beyhan Çalışkan:
One of the key gaps in Europe’s digital ecosystem is the lack of large-scale cloud infrastructure providers built on European technology foundations.
At NGX Storage, we see our role as helping enable that ecosystem.
NGX is a European storage vendor, and we design storage platforms specifically for modern infrastructure environments, including cloud service providers, AI platforms, and large-scale enterprise deployments.
Our portfolio includes:
• Unified storage arrays supporting SAN, NAS, and Object workloads
• Scale-out block storage platforms
• Scale-out object storage architectures
These platforms are designed to serve as the storage foundation for cloud infrastructure.
Equally important is integration. Cloud environments require deep automation and orchestration capabilities. NGX platforms provide a rich set of integration tools including:
• Comprehensive REST APIs
• Cinder driver support for OpenStack environments
• CSI drivers for Kubernetes platforms
These capabilities make it straightforward for European cloud providers to integrate NGX storage into their infrastructure stacks and operate it at scale.
Ultimately, our goal is not just to deliver storage systems.
It’s to provide open, high-performance infrastructure building blocks that help European cloud providers grow and compete globally.
Because strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty will require not only policy discussions, but also strong, scalable infrastructure technologies built within the ecosystem itself.