How AI, digital sovereignty and data localization are reshaping European data strategies

How data locality and metro-edge data centers fuel Europe's AI future

· TechRadar

Opinion By Nigel Edwards published 12 January 2026

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AI has become the driving force behind Europe’s digital ambitions.

Across industries, from healthcare and manufacturing to finance, energy, retail, and logistics, organizations are racing to deploy new models, automate processes, and secure a competitive edge. Yet a critical challenge persists: many are trying to build advanced AI systems on infrastructures that don’t meet the requirements of these complex workloads.

Nigel Edwards

Vice President at Western Digital.

Discussions about AI often center on GPUs, training methods, model performance, and talents. But it is another consideration that lies at the heart of any digital system – organizations need enough storage capacity to keep up with the sheer volume of data that AI requires.

At the same time, Europe’s push for digital sovereignty is reshaping its regulatory landscape, prompting enterprises to rethink how and where their data is stored.

These dynamics, AI’s exploding data generation and demand as well as Europe’s increasingly stringent data governance requirements (e.g., Data Governance Act (DGA), GDPR, and the EU AI Act) touch different parts of the new AI data economy and can create significant complexity.

So what should organizations consider as they try to navigate both? And how to turn this emerging environment into an advantage?

How the sovereignty drive is reshaping technical architectures

Digital transformation has driven organizations to rely more heavily on interconnected, distributed and multi-domain IT architectures. The ‘five Vs’ of data - velocity, volume, value, variety and veracity – should also shape an organizations' core tiered infrastructure.

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