Sovereign Cloud Expands in EU: OpenText €105M Ireland

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Saturday June thirteen, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: OpenText pours over a hundred million euros into Ireland for AI and sovereign cloud, DXC Technology teams up with Anthropic to roll Claude into big enterprises, US lawmakers push to rein in military AI, the UK puts billions on the table for AI infrastructure at London Tech Week, and to close out, two things you can actually try yourself, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Google's free AI Essentials course. Let's start in Ireland.

OpenText invests over one hundred million euros in Ireland to expand agentic AI and sovereign cloud.

Samantha: OpenText, the Canadian enterprise data and information management company, has announced an investment of one hundred and five million euros into its Irish operations. The money will go towards expanding its agentic AI work and what it calls sovereign cloud services, and it should create around four hundred new jobs over the next three years.

Bob: Sovereign cloud is the key phrase here. It means cloud services where the data physically stays within a specific jurisdiction, controlled under local law, not routed through servers in the US or elsewhere. For European customers, that has become a serious selling point, especially for banks, hospitals, and government bodies that are nervous about US data laws reaching into European systems.

Samantha: And the agentic AI piece refers to AI systems that don't just answer questions but actually carry out multi-step tasks on their own, like processing an invoice end to end or pulling together a compliance report without a human walking it through each step.

Bob: Ireland keeps positioning itself as the European base for these kinds of investments. Low corporate tax rates, English-speaking workforce, and a dense cluster of tech firms already there. OpenText joins a long list of US and Canadian tech companies that pick Dublin or Cork as their European hub.

Samantha: The four hundred jobs are aimed at AI engineers, cloud specialists, and cybersecurity roles. That's a meaningful number for a single announcement, even by Irish tech standards.

Bob: For European customers, the practical impact is more options for keeping sensitive data inside the EU while still using advanced AI tools. That has been a recurring complaint from European firms, that the heavy AI capabilities sit on US infrastructure, with all the legal grey areas that brings. A bigger sovereign cloud footprint inside the EU is the kind of thing CIOs in regulated sectors have been asking for.

Samantha: It also fits the broader push from Brussels around digital sovereignty. The European Commission has been vocal about reducing dependence on non-EU cloud providers, and investments like this give that policy a concrete data point to point at, even though OpenText itself is not European.

Bob: One caveat: a hundred and five million euros sounds large, but compared to the tens of billions being thrown around in the US and the UK for AI infrastructure, it's a modest number. The significance is more about where it lands and what it signals than the raw figure.

DXC Technology partners with Anthropic to push Claude AI deep into banks, airlines and governments.

Samantha: DXC Technology, the US-based IT services firm, has signed a multi-year global partnership with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models. DXC becomes one of a small group of so-called Global Premier partners in Anthropic's network, and plans to train tens of thousands of its engineers to be Claude-certified.

Bob: The deal targets the kind of customers DXC already runs IT systems for: banks, airlines, insurers, manufacturers, and government agencies. The idea is to plug Claude into mission-critical systems, the back-end software that actually runs these organisations day to day.

Samantha: Three areas are highlighted. First, code modernisation, basically using Claude to rewrite ageing software systems that many big companies still rely on. Second, cybersecurity, using the AI to spot threats and respond faster. And third, building what they call certified agents, AI assistants that can manage parts of enterprise applications autonomously.

Bob: For Anthropic, this is a serious channel into the enterprise market. They have been positioned as a more safety-focused alternative to OpenAI, and getting embedded into a giant systems integrator like DXC is one of the fastest ways to land in big regulated industries.

Samantha: For DXC's European customers, and there are many, this means Claude becomes a default option in transformation projects. Industry analysts have noted that European banks and insurers have been cautious about which AI vendor to commit to, partly because of regulatory uncertainty around the EU AI Act.

Bob: There's also a workforce angle. Tens of thousands of certified engineers is a sizeable training pipeline, and a chunk of that will sit in European delivery centres. It accelerates the practical know-how on the ground here, not just in San Francisco.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

US Congress moves to put strict guardrails on AI used for military targeting and planning.

Bob: US lawmakers are pushing to widen the existing limits on autonomous weapons. A provision inserted into the House defence bill would require the Pentagon to set or revise rules for AI systems that support, recommend, or materially influence decisions about using force.

Samantha: That phrasing is broader than it first sounds. It covers AI used in operational planning, in target development, in what's called weaponeering, basically matching weapons to targets, and in engagement recommendations. So not just the killer robot scenario, but the AI sitting behind the scenes shaping decisions.

Bob: This is a notable shift. Until recently, the public conversation focused mostly on fully autonomous weapons, the ones that pull the trigger themselves. This proposal acknowledges that decision-support AI can shape outcomes just as much, even when a human technically signs off at the end.

Samantha: The political backdrop is growing unease in Washington about how quickly the Pentagon has been adopting commercial AI tools. There have been multiple contracts with major AI labs in the past year, and Congress wants clearer rules before those tools get woven any deeper into command chains.

Bob: It's worth flagging that this is still in the markup stage of the House defence bill. It hasn't passed. So the right framing is: lawmakers are pushing for these controls, not that they are in force.

Samantha: For Europe, this is significant as a reference point. NATO allies coordinate closely on defence standards, and several European governments are working on their own rules for military AI. A US framework, if it lands, would shape how those European rules look too.

Bob: The European Defence Agency has been running its own discussions about responsible AI use in the armed forces, and analysts there have pointed to US legislative moves as influential templates.

London Tech Week draws billions in pledges to build out the UK's AI infrastructure.

Samantha: London Tech Week wrapped up with a series of headline-grabbing investment commitments. The UK government announced what it calls an AI Hardware Plan worth one point one billion pounds, including seven hundred and fifty million for a national supercomputer and a hundred and fifty million for next-generation AI chips developed by British companies.

Bob: On top of that, AMD pledged up to two billion pounds over five years for high-performance computing work and stakes in UK startups. And the cloud provider Nebius said it will commit one point seven billion pounds for AI capacity in the UK, including deployments of Nvidia hardware.

Samantha: The event itself drew over thirty thousand attendees and six hundred speakers, which gives a sense of the scale London is trying to project as Europe's AI hub.

Bob: The funding for British chip firms is interesting. Most of the money in AI hardware flows to a handful of US giants, and the UK is trying to carve out a niche around what's called inference, the running of trained AI models, rather than the training itself, which is dominated by Nvidia.

Samantha: For the broader European AI landscape, this widens the gap with the EU. The UK, outside the bloc since Brexit, can move faster on industrial policy and chase US capital more aggressively. Brussels has launched its own AI Continent Action Plan, but the numbers there are spread across twenty-seven member states.

Bob: Industry voices in Paris and Berlin have argued that without coordinated European investment at a similar scale, the UK risks pulling AI talent and startups away from continental Europe. Whether that materialises depends on how much of the announced money actually lands in concrete projects.

Samantha: The supercomputer in particular is the kind of asset that anchors a research ecosystem. Once it's running, universities and startups across the UK get access to compute that's otherwise prohibitively expensive.

Bob: Right, to close out, two things you can actually look at this weekend.

Meta donates Ray-Ban smart glasses to blind US veterans, showcasing AI as a daily accessibility tool.

Samantha: Meta has announced it will donate Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to every legally blind veteran in the United States, in partnership with the Blinded Veterans Association. The glasses include cameras, speakers, microphones, and Meta's AI assistant built in.

Bob: What makes them genuinely useful for blind and partially sighted users is the voice control. You can ask the glasses to describe what's in front of you, read a menu, identify an object, or place a call, all hands-free. Reviewers and users in the visually impaired community have widely praised this combination as one of the first AI-wearable products that delivers a real everyday benefit.

Samantha: The donation programme itself is US-only, but the Ray-Ban Meta glasses are sold in Europe, including in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and several other markets. Prices start around three hundred and twenty-nine euros, so they are not cheap, but they are in the same range as a mid-tier pair of regular sunglasses or premium headphones.

Bob: For European listeners curious about what's possible, the accessibility features are switched on through the Meta AI app. The "describe my surroundings" function and live translation are among the most talked-about uses. Users in the accessibility community have noted that the glasses work well in well-lit settings and struggle more in low light, the same as any camera-based system.

Samantha: There's a broader point here. Smart glasses have been a category looking for a use case since Google Glass flopped over a decade ago. Accessibility may be the application that finally gives them mainstream credibility, and Meta is leaning hard into that framing.

Bob: Worth knowing: Meta AI's full feature set isn't yet available in all European countries due to data protection rules. Some functions are limited or rolling out gradually depending on where you live. The basic camera, audio, and translation features are widely available, the advanced AI ones less so.

Google's AI Essentials course offers a free, beginner-friendly way to get to grips with generative AI.

Samantha: Sticking with practical things you can do, Google's AI Essentials course has become one of the most accessible free entry points for anyone wanting to understand how to actually use AI tools in everyday work. It came up in the context of Google's broader skills push, including the fifty million dollars announced for US trades training.

Bob: AI Essentials is a self-paced online course that takes around four to six hours to complete. It covers how to write effective prompts, how to use AI for everyday office tasks like drafting emails or summarising documents, and how to spot when an AI is making things up.

Samantha: It's available globally, in English and a growing number of other languages, and it's free. There's a paid certificate at the end if you want one, through the Coursera platform, but the course content itself you can work through without paying.

Bob: For European listeners, this is the kind of resource that's particularly useful right now. The EU AI Act includes obligations around AI literacy for staff who work with these systems, and a free, structured course like this is one straightforward way for smaller employers to start meeting that expectation without commissioning expensive training.

Samantha: Reviewers have noted it's deliberately beginner-friendly. You don't need a technical background. It's aimed at office workers, managers, and people who are AI-curious but haven't really sat down with the tools yet.

Bob: The course also covers responsible use, including bias and privacy concerns, which is the kind of context that often gets skipped in faster YouTube tutorials.

Samantha: One thing to flag: it's a Google course, so the examples lean heavily on Google's own AI tools. The principles transfer to other tools, but if you want a vendor-neutral grounding, you may want to pair it with material from elsewhere.

Samantha: That's it for today. We covered OpenText's investment in Ireland for AI and sovereign cloud, DXC Technology's enterprise partnership with Anthropic, the US Congress push to rein in military AI, the billions pledged at London Tech Week for UK AI infrastructure, and two things to try yourself: the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Google's AI Essentials course.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.