AI agents need infrastructure: Why Europe’s regional cloud strategy matters

It’s no secret that generative AI has shifted the operations and business models of companies in nearly every sector. But what if I were to tell you that one day, very soon, we will view these innovations the same way smartphone owners look back on the feature phones of the nineties: early experiments in a journey towards a much more significant technological transformation?

The fact is that AI is advancing faster than any technology in human history; faster than even its creators expected. Today, with many businesses still getting to grips with generative AI, the lens is already moving on to the next world-changing iteration of the technology: agentic AI.

The opportunity of agentic AI for Europe’s enterprises

Already estimated at around $9.14 billion, the agentic AI market is forecast to grow rapidly, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.5%, to reach $139.19 billion by 2034. Europe will be at the forefront of this boom, growing at a 42% CAGR.

The impact of all this investment on enterprises will be profoundly beneficial. According to one study, agentic AI could generate up to $450 billion in economic value through revenue growth and cost savings by 2028.

Today’s stand-alone AI models are rapidly being replaced by complex, multi-agent-driven automation, in which enterprise systems will be able to make decisions and act on them entirely autonomously.

As this happens, today’s stand-alone AI models are rapidly being replaced by complex, multi-agent-driven automation, in which enterprise systems will be able to make decisions and act on them entirely autonomously. I’m not saying that businesses should abandon their current generative AI efforts. They need to start putting the foundations in place for the agentic future now.

Ensuring cloud infrastructure is agentic-ready

Vultr CMO Kevin Cochrane

Agentic AI is a very different proposition to generative AI and demands a different approach within the data center. Rather than serving discrete models, agentic AI infrastructure will need to orchestrate multiple autonomous systems as they interact with one another and with human users.

From a technical perspective, that means balancing both high-performance cloud GPUs and CPUs in an end-to-end AI-optimised stack.

GPUs will be required to run massive LLMs, process data, and generate outputs, while CPUs will need to orchestrate agents and execute the tools and policies that enable them to be autonomous. Modern cloud infrastructure needs to balance these technologies to enable agentic applications to deliver on their considerable promise fully.

However, for European businesses, deploying agentic AI-ready cloud infrastructure comes down to much more than technical capabilities alone. To be fit for purpose, the European cloud offerings of tomorrow will need to be completely different from those currently in play. There must be a decisive break from the past.

Data sovereignty and the need for regional AI infrastructure

Currently around two-thirds of European cloud services are provided by US hyperscalers. This situation is a legacy of a vanished world with a different set of geopolitical, economic, and regulatory conditions to our own. It harks back to a time when storing the data of European citizens and businesses overseas was much less problematic, and when cloud costs were more manageable.

Today, EU businesses need to balance agentic innovation with a renewed focus on regulatory compliance. This is because the EU is mandating measurable standards for data localization, operational control, and legal jurisdiction to address concerns about foreign surveillance risks, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and dependence on a small number of hyperscale providers. Once abstract concepts of data sovereignty have transformed into strict operating principles for European businesses. Cloud infrastructure must be stored locally and in the right operational jurisdiction to avoid foreign data subpoenas.

Addressing exploding cloud costs

A second consideration is cost. Data from Flexera shows that 81% of businesses still cite cost efficiency as their top metric for assessing progress against their cloud goals. Yet according to its research, 76% of large enterprises spend more than $5 million on the cloud each month, and nearly a third complain of wasted cloud spend.

Part of the problem is that enterprises are locked into hyperscaler contracts characterized by opaque pricing and forced service bundling. At just the moment they need to invest in agentic AI infrastructure, enterprises are struggling to fund their core cloud workloads, a situation that’s not helped by the skyrocketing price of CPUs.

As European businesses set out on their agentic AI journeys, the case for moving beyond the hyperscalers could not be more compelling.

Rooting cloud infrastructure in Europe

This is where alternative hyperscalers like Vultr come into their own. From a data sovereignty perspective, we operate nine European cloud data center regions, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Manchester, Paris, Stockholm, Warsaw, and, as of 19 May, Milan (with this launch, we now operate 33 global cloud data center regions).

These are physically isolated data centers that come with geo-fenced data management policies and guarantees that no data will be transferred or processed outside jurisdictional boundaries without explicit consent.

As well as helping European businesses comply with data sovereignty mandates, Vultr helps them avoid the high costs and systemic lock-in associated with traditional hyperscalers. With Vultr’s full-stack AI infrastructure, developers and enterprises can benefit from Vultr’s flagship CPU offering, VX1, which offers 23% better performance and 33% lower cost than comparable hyperscaler compute plans, resulting in up to 82% better price-to-performance.

In addition, Vultr offers European businesses with access to the latest AMD and NVIDIA GPUs for AI and machine learning, high-performance computing, and more, available on demand either as virtual machines, bare metal, or self-service clusters. This is the complete, end-to-end stack of next-generation compute power that businesses will need to thrive in the era of agentic AI.

The dominance of the hyperscalers is less certain than ever as data sovereignty mandates make the case for Europe-based infrastructure.

It’s an exciting time to be in the cloud infrastructure business. The dominance of the hyperscalers is less certain than ever as data sovereignty mandates make the case for Europe-based infrastructure. Meanwhile, businesses are pushing back against the high costs and systemic lock-in that come with hyperscaler offerings. In their place, enterprises can invest in high-performance, cost-effective compute infrastructure that’s open, flexible, and ready for the demands of agentic workloads.

Explore AI infrastructure solutions from Vultr.

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