News
Key Takeaways
- Unified sovereign cloud. SAP + Cohere offer a flexible, EU-compliant AI cloud platform.
- Expanded AI partnership. SAP and Cohere integrate agentic AI into SAP's platform.
- EU compliance focus. European enterprises gain AI capability with enhanced data sovereignty and regulatory alignment.
Announced Nov. 27th, SAP and Cohere launched the EU AI Cloud to provide European enterprises with sovereign compliant infrastructure for deploying agentic AI models within strict regulatory boundaries.
The joint offering unites capabilities under a single framework. The platform integrates Cohere's agentic AI North into the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
The combined platform enables enterprises to build enterprise-grade artificial intelligence into core processes while maintaining European data and model residency. According to company officials, the offering addresses demand from regulated industries requiring control over sensitive assets.
Notably, customers can select deployment options ranging from SAP's European data centers to customer-owned facilities.
Scope of Joint Functionality
Courtesy of the partnership, SAP customers are able to use Cohere models to build-out:
- Agentic task automation: Enable AI assistants that can take actions across enterprise tools and systems
- Multilingual RAG applications: Retrieve rank and summarize data from global policy manuals compliance documents or internal knowledge bases
- Secure document analysis: Understand long, structured, multimodal files like financial reports or medical imaging
- Context-aware enterprise search: Improve search accuracy across unstructured content like emails, chats, data files or contracts
Compliance Drives Sovereign AI Push
Stringent data residency rules and evolving regulations now force vendors to localize model deployment for European enterprises.
Data Sovereignty as Competitive Edge
A growing set of agentic AI vendors are pursuing EU-exclusive operations as a core capability and competitive differentiator. Announced recently, Workato launched EU-hosted agentic AI services to keep models inference and processing within the region. The company asserted this helps compliance teams balance innovation with strict regulatory constraints.
Data residency is often becoming a technical mandate rather than a feature. European enterprises require customer data to remain inside the EU throughout the entire AI lifecycle.
Regulations Shape Model Development, Deployment
The EU AI Act dictates how vendors build and deploy models. Native European models like Mistral's Le Chat trumpet specific compliance benefits over outside alternatives.
The EU AI Act mandates sweeping responsibilities for foundational models. US enterprises operating in Europe face new rules that force immediate evaluation of:
- Where data resides and which regulatory standards are met.
- Whether end-to-end encryption includes data at rest.
- How solutions audit information for compliance.
- What specific data crosses firewall boundaries.
Nation-State Models & Partnerships
Sovereign AI initiatives reflect national interests in controlling training data and model deployment. Beyond Europe Middle Eastern sovereign funds are pouring capital into regional AI hubs.
Partnerships grant AI companies access to domain-specific data. However securing proprietary enterprise datasets can present additional privacy challenges under European rules.
"By integrating Cohere's out-of-the-box intelligence into SAP's Cloud infrastructure and SAP Business Technology Platform we allow customers to deploy data security without the operational burden of becoming an AI engineering shop. This approach delivers true operational independence at scale ensuring that enterprise innovation never comes at the cost of compliance.
- Philipp Herzig
Chief Technology Officer, SAP SE
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EU AI Cloud Deployment Options
The platform offers multiple deployment paths to meet varying sovereignty requirements:
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| SAP Sovereign Cloud on SAP Infrastructure (EU) | IaaS with open-source tech in EU data centers |
| SAP Sovereign Cloud On-Site | SAP-operated infrastructure in customer facilities |
| Selected Hyperscalers | Commercial SaaS with sovereignty features |
| Delos Cloud | German sovereign solution for public sector |
| Partner AI Integration | Models from Cohere Mistral AI OpenAI via SAP BTP |
The SAP, Cohere Partnership
Cohere and SAP announced their partnership on May 20, 2025, bringing together Cohere’s enterprise-grade language models (Command, Rerank and Embed) into SAP’s generative-AI offering — specifically via SAP AI Core and its generative-AI hub, on the SAP Business Technology Platform.
The collaboration initially enabled SAP customers to deploy AI-powered capabilities such as enterprise search, retrieval-augmented generation, multilingual document processing and agentic AI workflows inside SAP’s secure infrastructure. And with this latest announcement the partnership begins to address the data sovereignty and sovereign AI requirements of European enterprises and governments.
