Open Innovation AI and NetApp forge strategic partnership on sovereign AI infrastructure
Two technology leaders announce collaboration to deliver secure, governed AI solutions for governments and enterprises at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026
Open Innovation AI, the UAE-based sovereign AI infrastructure and orchestration company, and NetApp, the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, have announced a strategic technology collaboration unveiled at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026.
The partnership brings together complementary capabilities designed to address the evolving requirements of governments and large-scale enterprises seeking to develop national AI capacity whilst maintaining sovereign control over their infrastructure and data assets.
Integrated Technology Framework
Open Innovation AI’s Sovereign AI Fabric provides hardware-agnostic software capable of provisioning, orchestrating, securing and operating GPU infrastructure across on-premises, hybrid and air-gapped deployments. This is paired with NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure platform, which transforms distributed enterprise data into trusted, AI-ready knowledge without necessitating movement, copying or consolidation.
The NetApp Platform enables seamless integration with leading AI and analytics ecosystems, supported by secure hybrid multi-cloud storage capabilities. By delivering near real-time, in-place access to AI-ready data, the solution significantly reduces the need for constant extraction, transformation and consolidation cycles.
Strategic Focus Areas
The collaboration will concentrate on three principal areas. First, exploration of integrated AI infrastructure that combines the Sovereign AI Fabric with the NetApp Platform across training, inference, retrieval-augmented generation and agentic AI workloads. Second, development of high-performance data infrastructure providing near real-time access to AI-ready data whilst enabling accelerated compute resources to operate at full efficiency. Third, potential sovereign AI deployments for governments, enterprises and neocloud providers across on-premises, hybrid and air-gapped environments.
Jose Petisco, Vice President of Strategic Markets at NetApp, emphasised the importance of data accessibility: “AI depends on data being available at the speed, scale and reliability that accelerated computing demands. By combining NetApp’s enterprise-grade AI data infrastructure with Open Innovation AI’s sovereign AI orchestration, we can assist customers to build sovereign AI environments where data stays protected, accessible and under their control, while providing near real-time access to AI-ready data across their infrastructure.”
Dr. Abed Benaichouche, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Open Innovation AI, highlighted the critical importance of robust data foundations: “Sovereign AI is only as strong as the data foundation beneath it. Governments and most large enterprises are investing in national AI capacity, and that capacity has to run on infrastructure they govern. By combining the NetApp Platform with our Sovereign AI Fabric, we aim to give them an integrated stack to build and operate AI at national scale.”
Source: WAM