Today, Accenture, in partnership with Google Cloud, is launching a new Accenture and Google Cloud Sovereign Centre in Brussels, with a dedicated training facility.
The new centre comes as governments and regulated sectors in Europe, such as finance, healthcare, and defence look to scale AI adoption while maintaining control over data, security, and compliance.
Through the Accenture Google Business Group, centre resources will combine Accenture’s industry, data and AI expertise with Google Cloud’s distributed cloud technologies. This facility showcases Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped, which is designed to support organisations with strict sovereignty, resilience, and regulatory requirements.
The centre provides organisations with a space to innovate, train, explore, design, and validate secure cloud and AI solutions in an air-gapped environment, supporting mission-critical workloads that cannot connect to public networks. It also provides a collaborative environment for organisations, independent software vendors, and ecosystem partners to develop proofs of concept, demonstrate solutions, and co-innovate on sovereign cloud and AI use cases.
Accenture and Google Cloud will focus on helping organisations reinvent across three priority areas:
- Sovereign Cloud and AI Adoption: organisations can design and validate AI-enabled use cases that align with regulatory, security, and data sovereignty requirements, supporting critical services across government, defense, and other regulated industries.
- Modernisation of Mission Critical Systems: Organisations can modernise legacy systems, improve resilience, and increase operational efficiency without compromising control. These capabilities support hybrid and distributed deployment models, allowing organisations to modernise at a pace aligned with regulatory and operational constraints.
- Workforce Enablement and Skills Development: The centre will also serve as a global hub for enablement and training, supporting the development of specialised skills required to operate and manage sovereign cloud and AI platforms.
By combining hands-on experience, technical validation, and industry expertise, Accenture and Google Cloud aim to help organisations responsibly adopt cloud and AI technologies while maintaining trust, security, and sovereignty.
Europe’s public sector pivots toward sovereign software solutions
The launch comes at a time when across Europe, public administrations, enterprises and educational institutions are reassessing their dependence on non-European software platforms, cloud providers and other tech infrastructure.
Check out our guide to European-built options.
In France, civil servants have ditched Zoom and Teams for Visio, an open-source videoconferencing solution developed by the government service for digital affairs (DINUM). In Germany, the Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) has developed openDesk https://www.opendesk.eu/en/, an office and collaboration suite designed for the public sector.
Last month, a coalition of European tech players, including IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian and BTactic, launched Euro-Office, an open-source competitor to Microsoft's productivity suite aimed at reducing reliance on non-European platforms and strengthening digital sovereignty through European governance and infrastructure.
According to Mauro Macchi, EMEA CEO at Accenture, trust, compliance and sovereignty are critical to public services and regulated industries as they accelerate AI adoption.
“However, even in these sectors, levels of control needed across data, models, and infrastructure can vary according to use cases. It’s rarely a full-control-or-nothing decision.
The centre will enable our clients to explore and validate different sovereign AI options, and make the right decisions according to their needs, so they can innovate with confidence. It will also enable them to train their people in sovereign AI skills, building in-house expertise to maintain appropriate oversight.”
Tara Brady, President of Google Cloud EMEA, said:
“Together with Accenture, we are helping European organisations address the paradox of how to embrace the transformative power of AI while upholding the strictest standards of digital sovereignty.
Our new Sovereign Innovation centre is a secure, collaborative space where public sector and regulated organisations can build, test, and validate real-world AI solutions, ensuring their most sensitive workloads remain protected."
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