"Sovereign" is used loosely in cloud marketing. For a buyer, it comes down to verifiable answers about where the hardware is, who controls it and what the contract says. These ten questions separate the substance from the label; next to each is how Sapience answers it.
Location and jurisdiction
1. Where, physically, is my data processed and stored?
Ask for a country and city, not a "region". Sapience: on Sapience systems in a colocation data centre in Bratislava, Slovakia.
2. Is data ever replicated outside the EU?
Backups, logs and support tooling count. Sapience does not replicate customer data outside the EU; backup and replication arrangements are defined in the contract.
3. Which legal entity operates the infrastructure, and under which law?
Sapience AI s.r.o., Bratislava, operating under European law.
4. Does the service depend on a non-EU hyperscaler?
Many "EU" offers run on top of a US cloud's compute, storage or network. Sapience has no dependency on US hyperscalers for compute, storage or networking.
Isolation and security
5. Is the hardware shared with other customers?
Single-tenant by default: dedicated compute, storage and network with hardware-level segmentation. Private clusters on request.
6. How is data encrypted?
TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest, encrypted NVMe on every node.
7. Which certifications are complete, and which are in progress?
A badge wall is not an answer; ask for status and audit dates. Sapience: GDPR and the EU AI Act apply; ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certification are in progress.
8. Who answers the security questionnaire?
At Sapience, the engineers who run the infrastructure, in writing.
Capacity and contract
9. Is the capacity guaranteed for the term, or can it be reclaimed?
Sapience clusters are reserved for a term and are not oversubscribed.
10. What exactly is confirmed in writing before signing?
The written quote confirms rate, term, delivery date and availability. See how reservations work.
The full list of controls is on the security page; sector-specific notes are under healthcare, financial services and public sector and research.
Questions about your workload?
Describe the model, the data and the timeline. You get a recommendation and a quote, not a sales deck.