LLMOps Sovereignty: Your AI Data Deserves European Law
AI and LLM operations are the newest sovereignty frontier. Every prompt you send, every fine-tuning dataset you upload, every model output you receive contains business intelligence. When you use OpenAI's API, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI, that data flows through US infrastructure, governed by US law, and accessible under the CLOUD Act without European judicial process.
Running LLM infrastructure on European soil under European law is the only way to keep your AI interactions outside foreign jurisdiction. But sovereignty is more than where GPUs are located. The EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework defines eight dimensions that determine whether your provider is truly sovereign.
Why open-source LLM tooling strengthens sovereignty
Proprietary AI platforms lock you into a single vendor's API, pricing, and terms of service. Open-source LLM infrastructure (vLLM, LiteLLM, Ollama, text-generation-inference) gives you:
- No vendor lock-in: switch models, providers, or hosting at any time
- Full auditability: inspect every component in your inference pipeline
- Data stays in Europe: prompts and outputs remain on European infrastructure under European law
- Community-governed: no single company controls your AI stack's roadmap
VSHN operates LLM infrastructure on European Kubernetes clusters, including Swiss cloud providers (Cloudscale, Exoscale) and European providers (Hetzner, OVH). The operator is VSHN AG, a Swiss company under Swiss law with no foreign parent. How that scores on each of the EU framework's eight dimensions is in the self-assessment below.
LLMOps sovereignty compared
| Dimension | OpenAI API | Azure OpenAI | AWS Bedrock | Google Vertex AI | VSHN Managed LLMOps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership | OpenAI (USA) | Microsoft (USA) | Amazon (USA) | Google (USA) | VSHN AG (Switzerland) |
| Governing law | US law | US law | US law | US law | Swiss law (EU adequacy) |
| CLOUD Act | Exposed | Exposed | Exposed | Exposed | Not exposed |
| Data location | USA | Regional (US-controlled) | Regional (US-controlled) | Regional (US-controlled) | Europe (Swiss or EU data centers, including Hetzner in Finland) |
| Software stack | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | Open source (vLLM, LiteLLM, Kubernetes) |
| Prompt data access | Provider has access, may use for training | Microsoft has access | Amazon has access | Google has access | VSHN has operational access only for authorized support, never for model training |
| Staff access from abroad | OpenAI sub-processor list | Teams worldwide; remote access from outside EU and EFTA for repairs | Support staff worldwide, including USA and India | Maintenance and support staff in 30+ countries, including USA and India | VSHN Canada for night-time scheduled work; none with the Swiss-only option |
| Certifications | SOC 2 | SOC 2, ISO 27001 | SOC 2, ISO 27001 | SOC 2, ISO 27001 | ISO 27001, ISAE 3402 Type II |
VSHN sovereignty self-assessment
We applied the EU's Cloud Sovereignty Framework (v1.2.1, October 2025) to our own services. This framework was used to score providers in the EU's EUR 180M sovereign cloud tender in April 2026. Three pure-European providers achieved SEAL-3, while a consortium involving Google Cloud scored only SEAL-2.
This is a self-assessment, not a formal SEAL certification. We publish it for transparency so customers can evaluate our sovereignty profile using the same structured criteria the EU uses.
| # | Dimension | Weight | Assessment | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOV-1 | Strategic | 15% | Strong | Swiss AG under Swiss law, no foreign parent (Commercial Register) |
| SOV-2 | Legal | 10% | Strong | Swiss law (GTC), no CLOUD Act, EU adequacy decision |
| SOV-3 | Data & AI | 10% | Strong | European DCs by default. Sovereign key management via Managed OpenBao + Swiss HSM |
| SOV-4 | Operational | 15% | Strong | Swiss 24/7 ops, Swiss-only support option. All services on vanilla Kubernetes |
| SOV-5 | Supply Chain | 20% | Strong | Infrastructure-agnostic, customer chooses provider. Open-source software |
| SOV-6 | Technology | 15% | Strong | 100% open source. VSHN contributes to K8up (CNCF Sandbox) and maintains Project Syn |
| SOV-7 | Security | 10% | Strong | ISO 27001, ISAE 3402 Type II, Swiss SOC. FINMA-regulated customers |
| SOV-8 | Environmental | 5% | Moderate | DC operators: Green Datacenter AG (ISO 22301/27001/27701), Exoscale sustainability. VSHN CSR policy |
Overall: SEAL-3 equivalent, the same level achieved by the winners of the EU's own sovereignty tender. No bidder in the EU's own tender reached SEAL-4: it requires complete EU control with no critical non-EU dependencies, and every cloud provider depends on hardware made in Asia and the US and on open-source projects governed by US-based foundations such as the Linux Foundation and CNCF.
Get a sovereignty assessment for your LLM infrastructure
Using US-hosted AI APIs or evaluating sovereign alternatives? We assess your current setup against the EU framework and design LLM infrastructure that keeps your prompts, training data, and model outputs under European jurisdiction.