A sovereign IT infrastructure is open to interpretation. Only the American hyperscalers consider data residency sufficient to call an IT stack sovereign. Rarely, however, is the physical hardware discussed: how autonomous are you if your chips come from elsewhere? SUSE and Openchip are setting a good example by aiming for RISC-V-based hardware of European origin.
Let’s be clear: Openchip, just as was the case a year ago, has not yet produced a chip. We should expect an actual product by early 2027 at the latest. It’s clear that RISC-V forms the basis of the design—an ISA that, unlike x86 and Arm, is free from restrictive licenses or per-unit licensing fees. Another contrasting fact is that even the fastest RISC-V-based systems are far from offering competitive speeds. That should change over time.
SUSE and Openchip: hardware and software
The new collaboration between SUSE and Openchip is therefore intended to form the basis for advanced RISC-V accelerators—a term primarily used when referring to the fastest AI chips. However, we should initially expect performance to be moderate. That said, it doesn’t have to be incredibly fast to still be a meaningful addition to the chip lineup. European automakers, which rely on countless energy-efficient but not particularly powerful processors, will welcome any increase in European offerings in this area. The same applies to organizations that must remain compliant and strive for maximum autonomy.
Providing critical environments with a “truly sovereign” solution—that is the approach of SUSE and Openchip. In terms of software, there’s no doubt about the setup: multiple Linux distributions, a mature Kubernetes management layer, and a suite of AI solutions via SUSE AI Factory provide a solid infrastructure on which to deploy applications—whether sovereign or not. It’s easy to imagine an office suite like Nextcloud’s being deployed on top of such an environment, resulting in far less U.S. interference than before.
Plugging the gaps
We have long argued that a truly sovereign IT infrastructure should not be based on a simplistic definition. A digital workplace independent of non-European entities is already possible, but it still runs on hardware sourced from outside Europe. Everything from routers to network switches, DNS services to security solutions—while they can sometimes be purchased from Europe (though this is by no means always the case, depending on the field)—they are in fact mostly American, Chinese, or, very occasionally, from another non-European country.
Sovereignty projects therefore revolve around plugging gaps. Open-source solutions are often stopgap measures where the digital chain still has to make do without European solutions. Through this collaboration, SUSE and Openchip are explicitly focusing on compliance. “Our enterprise customers require predictable infrastructure that complies with evolving European data regulations,” said Andreas Prins, Global Head Sovereign Solutions at SUSE. “By collaborating early with Openchip, we ensure that when their RISC-V hardware hits the market, the software stack – from the Linux operating system to Kubernetes container management – will be fully optimized, secure, and ready for deployment.”