On Wednesday 2 April 2025, Luxembourg-based company, Gcore, and German software company, Northern Data Group, announced a new strategic partnership with the goal of transforming AI deployment and Inferencing.
In a press release, the firms described the commercial partnership as positioning Northern Data Group and Gcore as the leading provider of combined AI as a Service, and AI delivery and networking technologies to enterprise clients and model developers.
André Reitenbach, CEO of Gcore, said: "Gcore has signed a strategic agreement with Northern Data to form a full-stack sovereign AI cloud - supporting customers on prem, at the core and at the edge, with the largest GPU footprint among European cloud providers. By leveraging our software, network and engineering capabilities, we’re strengthening our foundational services to support Gcore and Northern Data customers on their AI disruption journey in Europe and beyond."
The partnership is expected to establish the Intelligence Delivery Network (IDN) a “cutting-edge” distributed global network that boasts 180 points of presence, 200+ Tbps of network capacity and 14,000+ peering partners. The IDN is designed to enable the low-latency and secure delivery of AI workloads, described as a critical driver for the wider adoption of AI inferencing applications.
The IDN will be powered by Northern Data’s existing infrastructure and Gcore’s Everywhere Inference software and networking architecture. Through the combined infrastructure and software stack, customers will be “enabled by a powerful vertically integrated toolkit of AI solutions”, including Managed Kubernetes and an AI model library. The technology is expected to support the deployment of both open source and custom-built AI models.
The press release added that Northern Data and Gcore’s combined offering will be delivered through an on-demand and simple-to-deploy architecture, offering clients real-time access to this full-stack solution and allowing the companies to “fully maximise” the utilisation of its infrastructure. Additionally, this commercial and technology partnership is expected to deepen each company’s access to a large and diversified customer base that seeks to deploy AI solutions globally, retain enterprise grade security and data protection and sovereignty and optimise infrastructure resourcing.
Northern Data Group has taken two seats on the Board of Directors, effective immediately, and secured an option to acquire a majority of the outstanding capital stock of Gcore at a predefined valuation. The option exercise is subject to the successful completion of customary due diligence by Northern Data.
Aroosh Thillainathan, Founder and CEO of Northern Data Group, commented: “We are combining Northern Data’s heritage of HPC [high-performance computing] and Data Centre infrastructure expertise, with Gcore’s software innovation and engineering expertise, allowing us to accelerate our vision of delivering software-enabled AI infrastructure across a globally distributed computer network. This is an inflection point where the use of AI solutions is evolving rapidly and we believe that this partnership will form a key part of the next phase of AI adoption.”
Andre Reitenbach, CEO of Gcore, said: “Partnering with Northern Data will provide Gcore and our enterprise customers access to one of the largest liquid-cooled GPU clusters and significant data centre capacity worldwide. This collaboration supports Gcore’s mission to connect the world to AI anywhere and anytime with low latency, leveraging cutting-edge infrastructure to power the next generation of AI-driven applications.”
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