The Sovereign AI Cloud Revolution: Why You Don't Buy It, You Build It
- Jun 8
- 2 min read
I'm going to tell you about myself. I'm going to tell you. And someone is actually doing it.
The Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KINiT) in Slovakia just published a case study worth reading: how they built a complete sovereign AI cloud—from bare metal to training workloads—using exclusively open source stacks and without any vendor lock-in ( https://lnkd.in/gyHBFM7P ).
The stack: OpenStack for IaaS, Ceph for distributed storage with intelligent tiering (local NVMe for training, network Ceph for results, cold storage for backups), Kubernetes (Official) via Cluster API for on-demand orchestration of AI workloads, Keycloak for identity federation. NVIDIA H200 and RTX Pro 6000 GPUs. 200 Gbps leaf-spine network. Everything is documented, everything is in GitOps, everything is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Because it concerns us.
At Epic Edge, we work precisely at this intersection: 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘁𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗔𝗜. Our vision is that the sovereign cloud of the future is not just an environment that hosts AI workloads, but an infrastructure that uses AI to manage itself, to lower the barrier to entry, to make accessible to SMEs and researchers what today requires a dedicated team of cloud engineers.
The KINiT case study demonstrates three key things:
1. The open source stack (OpenStack + Ceph + Kubernetes) is production-ready for AI workloads on high-performance GPUs. This isn't a compromise—it's an architectural choice.
2. "Sovereign" isn't a marketing label. It means available source code, documented procedures, replicable GitOps, and no dependencies on proprietary vendors. Sovereign by design, not by label.
3. Day 2 is part of the project, not an afterthought. KINiT has integrated monitoring, observability, and identity federation since day zero.
This is exactly the direction we're going. We'll be discussing it at WMF - We Make Future 2026 in Bologna.
hashtag #SovereignAI hashtag #OpenStack hashtag #Ceph hashtag #Kubernetes hashtag #AI hashtag #OpenSource hashtag #CloudSovrano hashtag #WMF2026 hashtag #EpicEdge
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