APU’s first commercial deployment in the European cloud meets burgeoning AI demand, enabling EU enterprises to accelerate Apache Spark workloads while maintaining full control of their data
Speedata, developer of the world’s first purpose-built analytical processing unit (APU), announced a strategic partnership with Nebul, Europe’s leading private AI Neocloud provider. Nebul will be the first company to deploy Speedata’s APU technology within its sovereign cloud infrastructure, enabling European companies to run advanced analytics and AI data processing workloads at scale while maintaining full jurisdictional control over their data.
As the need for secure AI computing grows, demand for AI data center capacity will triple in Europe by 2025, requiring neocloud providers to significantly expand. At the same time, European organizations are facing structural challenges. Accelerating data-intensive workloads has traditionally meant moving to a hyperscale cloud provider, where the parent company may be subject to foreign legal jurisdiction.
This partnership brings decisive advantages to Nebul’s customers. By integrating Speedata’s analytics accelerators with Nebul’s European-owned infrastructure, enterprises can significantly improve performance and reduce total cost of ownership for Apache Spark workloads while keeping data under European legal jurisdiction.
Speedata’s APU is the first processor built specifically for big data and advanced analytics workloads. In standard benchmarks, APUs demonstrated up to 100x performance improvement compared to CPUs and GPUs. APUs work with CPUs and GPUs to address data-layer bottlenecks, improving time to insight, energy efficiency, and cost.
Beyond traditional data processing workloads such as batch ETL, APU accelerates AI data preparation and cleaning, as well as real-time query-oriented RAG and TAG (table-oriented generation), bringing accelerated structured and tabular data to LLM.
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APU is a hardware-optimized ASIC that runs Apache Spark SQL natively, performing complex queries, joins, aggregations, and transformations directly in silicon instead of in memory.
Nebul will host Speeddata’s renewable energy-powered APU technology within its European data center network. As a preferred Speeddata partner and sovereign cloud provider in EMEA, Nebul will offer APU as part of its data platform, providing European businesses with high-performance, advanced analytics solutions that sustainably complement Nebul’s existing AI infrastructure.
Performing advanced analytics at scale is always very expensive. “APU changes that equation,” said Adi Gelvan, CEO of Speedata. “In one enterprise AI data preprocessing deployment, a customer replaced 38 servers with just three, achieving cost savings of over 90%.” With Speedata on Nebul’s sovereign cloud, European companies can reduce infrastructure and operational costs while keeping their data under European governance. ”
Sovereignty is not a statement of value. “It’s an operational requirement,” said Arnold Juffer, CEO of Nebul. “True data sovereignty goes beyond GDPR compliance and EU-based data centers and encompasses ownership structure, operational control, and jurisdiction. Our customers need to know who owns their infrastructure, who operates it, and who can enforce access. Speeddata Now we can add high-performance data processing performance to that offer.”
This partnership reflects the growing demand among European businesses for infrastructure acceleration that addresses sovereignty as a governance issue, rather than just a compliance checkbox.
The partnership will initially focus on EMEA enterprise customers in areas where both analytical performance and data governance are critical.
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