The Netherlands takes a major step toward digital autonomy with first sovereign data & AI platform
Weather company Infoplaza moves its data operations from American hyperscalers to the European platform Databaas.
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Wolk launches Databaas, with Infoplaza as its first customer. From left to right: Stijn Meijers, co-founder and CPO at Wolk; Jelle van Miltenburg, co-founder and CEO at Wolk; Sjoerd Huininga, Head of Development at Infoplaza B.V.; Robert van Dijk, Head of Infra & Support at Infoplaza B.V. Photo: Marieke van den Oever.
Utrecht, 20 October 2026. Anyone looking for a managed data and AI platform almost always ends up with one of the big American players. Databaas, from the Dutch company Wolk, is Europe’s answer to that. Wolk is introducing the first Dutch managed data and AI platform that organisations can run wherever they choose. International weather company Infoplaza, which supplies critical weather data to shipping, rail operators and winter road maintenance, among others, is the first organisation to use Databaas.
With Databaas, organisations keep full control over their data and AI workload: on their own hardware, in a Dutch data centre or on a European cloud, entirely free of American cloud providers. In doing so, Databaas fills a missing piece in the tech ecosystem on the road to greater European digital autonomy.
“Shipping, offshore wind, rail and large-scale events make decisions every day based on our weather data. That means wanting to decide for yourself where that data lives and who has control over it. With Databaas, the entire data chain stays in European hands, and our data teams get a modern platform to build and innovate on,” says Sjoerd Huininga, Head of Development at Infoplaza.
Digital autonomy is more than a European cloud
Europe is investing heavily in cloud providers, and their offerings increasingly resemble those of their American competitors. But before organisations move their data to European clouds, they need more than just infrastructure. They want to draw insights from their data, build dashboards and connect agents to it. To make that happen, data engineers, researchers and AI experts work on ingesting, cleaning and analysing data. For that, they need an application layer on top of these clouds: a data & AI platform.
American companies have built excellent solutions for this. However, these data platforms only run on American clouds. For many organisations, that is a reason to stay with American clouds. Anyone who uses these platforms has no choice but to host their data with an American cloud provider.
While the American tech ecosystem provides every layer of the data stack, Europe was missing a link until today. Infographic: Wolk.
The European tech ecosystem is becoming more complete
At the cloud level, fully fledged European alternatives now exist. But at the layer above it, the data and AI platform that data teams work on every day, there were no fully fledged options until today. Large organisations that still want to move to European clouds often try to build a custom data platform themselves, but these are costly projects that take years.
“The European clouds are there, but the tech ecosystem was still missing a managed data platform for working effectively with data and making it available for things like AI agents. It’s a bit like Europe laying brand-new railway tracks, but everyone who wants to use them first has to build their own train,” says Stijn Meijers, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Wolk.
Databaas now makes it possible for organisations to run their data and AI workload on European clouds. This is especially relevant for organisations that work with critical or sensitive data, such as in healthcare, science, government, energy and finance. In these sectors, more and more organisations are looking to European providers to entrust their data to.
This development is in line with the Cloud Sovereignty Framework, which the European Commission has used since 2025 to assess the sovereignty of cloud services. It considers not only where data is located, but also European ownership, control and jurisdiction across the entire system.
Databaas will be available to new customers from the first quarter of 2027. Interested organisations can explore the platform and sign up at www.databaas.eu.
