The bombshell news that has had a permanent effect on the European AI landscape has been dropped by the two tech giants, HPE and NVIDIA, recently. At the HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 conference, the two firms announced the launch of the AI Factory Lab in Grenoble, France, which is the first of its kind on the European continent and will be responsible for the testing and screening of AI in the European environment to be in alignment with local regulations.
The Grenoble plant satisfies European sovereignty demands
The AI Factory Lab in Grenoble embodies a “revolutionary solution to the ever-growing need of European enterprises and institutions concerning data sovereignty and regulatory issues.” The presence of the lab in France gives clients the advantage of testing and optimizing their AI workloads in a controlled environment that satisfies the strict local rules and regulations regarding data sovereignty and regulatory issues in the European Union. The AI Factory Lab in Grenoble incorporates the latest servers from HPE, accelerated computing solutions from NVIDIA, Spectrum-X Ethernet solutions, and the HPE Juniper Networking Platform.
The European marketplace is undergoing a gradual shift in focus towards the need for operational sovereignty in order to provide a reliable and compliant infrastructure solution for AI to function effectively in the European Union. The solution has the latest Government Ready Software for AI Enterprise by NVIDIA, HPE Alletra storage solutions, and air-cooled AI Sovereign Factory Environments. The solution allows the assessment of its performance based on infrastructure in the European Union.
The expanded portfolio offers improved AI factory solutions
HPE and NVIDIA announced a broad expansion of their work in AI infrastructure well beyond their Grenoble lab announcement. The two firms announced new offerings for “AI factories” with enhanced security and scalability, featuring an extended family of HPE Private Cloud AI solutions supporting NVIDIA Blackwell-generation RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition GPUs. The new offerings provide improved security and usability for large-scale AI workloads in a variety of industries.
The collaboration has now been expanded to include AI software hardened and made FIPS compliant for air-gapped networks, adding an extra layer of security for those who need to be compliant. The new networking solutions leverage the Spectrum-X and HPE Juniper MX/PTX routers to facilitate superior workload performance in clusters spanning across cloud solutions and geographies.
The strategic partnerships enhance the security and compliance environment
HPE has established strategic partnerships with the best companies in the fields of security and confidential computing to improve the AI Factory landscape. The company has partnered with CrowdStrike because it is the best security solution available to provide security to the users of HPE Private Cloud AI offerings. The collaboration aims to improve the existing partnerships to provide security for the end-to-end AI innovation process, such as large language models accelerated by NVIDIA.
Moreover, HPE is collaborating with Fortanix to utilize “NVIDIA Confidential Computing” and the Fortanix Armet AI solution to offer a turn-key platform to run trustworthy and “sovereign” AI-agents in trust-constrained settings. The solutions developed by Fortanix are compatible with the HPE Private Cloud AI platform and the HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a Gen12 servers featuring the “NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.”
Key availability timeline:
- AI Factory Lab in Grenoble: Q2 2026
- Sovereign AI factories: Available now
- HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000: January 2026
This historic collaboration between HPE and NVIDIA marks a turning point in the development of AI infrastructure in the European region. The Grenoble AI Factory Lab is much more than an invention and innovation in the realm of technologies—it is the European commitment to digital sovereignty and regulations. This is the best time for organizations to gear up for the launch of the Grenoble AI Factory Lab in Q2 of the year 2026.
