Shadow AI
Personal subscriptions, free chatbots, browser extensions. Useful work happens outside every policy, audit trail and procurement process, until something leaks.
The European Sovereign AI Cloud · by Combell, delaware and imec
Every AI-driven company carries three hidden risks: shadow AI nobody controls, token costs that grow every month, and data that quietly leaves the EU. The fix is one move: run your own sovereign AI cloud. A forty-five minute talk maps your usage, your risks and your savings: routing first, hardware when the maths says so.
of employees who use generative AI do so through a personal account, outside every policy and audit trail.
Netskope Cloud and Threat Report, 2026of organizations do not track token usage against a budget, so costs grow unnoticed while usage doubles.
Flexera, State of the Cloud 2026Gartner predicts AI inference costs per agentic workflow will increase more than fivefold through 2028.
Gartner, 17 August 2026The partnership
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Designs and runs it
Builds and operates the environment, including the AI gateways with budgets, personal-data filtering and a full audit log. Your single point of accountability from AI strategy to daily operations.
Hosts it
Provides the dedicated GPU servers in European datacenters. Combell, part of team.blue, runs them 24/7 as its own business-critical infrastructure: fully managed, with a predictable capacity fee instead of a per-token bill.
Measures and optimises it
Tests models on your own documents, code and agents with its aistack benchmarking environment, then tests and optimizes models and infrastructure against the customer's workloads, comparing quality and cost.
The frontier playbook
Years of cheap, all-you-can-use plans made your whole company dependent on ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude. Now the pricing flips to per-token meters that scale with your success: the more your teams rely on AI, the more you pay for exactly the same work. There is a way out: bring the habit home.
Personal subscriptions, free chatbots, browser extensions. Useful work happens outside every policy, audit trail and procurement process, until something leaks.
Every prompt to a US-frontier endpoint carries context: customer names, contracts, code. GDPR and the AI Act both ask where that data went, and who saw it.
AI token usage is the rising budget line in many enterprises. Match the right model to the right task and make the switch to the best deployment mode to ensure cost predictability: for APIs, cloud or on prem infrastructure.
AI readiness scan
Every “no” identifies a gap to address. At the end you see the sovereign hardware that fits your size: real contracts, no per-token meter.
Question 1 of 6
1 / 6
Question 01 · Shadow AI
Most leaders answer “probably not”. Whatever finds its way into a personal chat stays outside every policy and audit trail.
Question 02 · Cost visibility
If you can't name your Claude seat count per department from memory, the answer is no.
Question 03 · EU data residency
Personal accounts, browser extensions and unlogged API calls make any honest answer “no” by default.
Question 04 · Approved channel
If the sanctioned route is harder than opening ChatGPT, work quietly moves around it.
Question 05 · Sensitive data
One unapproved browser extension is enough to leak context you can't audit.
Question 06 · Bill surprises
Per-token meters grow with your success; duplicate seats hide in different cost centres.
Your verdict
Company data is reaching personal ChatGPT/Claude accounts, outside every policy and audit trail.
No single view of who uses what, in which department, at what cost. Spend drifts unmanaged.
Prompts and context leave the EU zone through endpoints you don't control.
Without an easy sanctioned route, work quietly moves around the policy you wrote.
Customer data, contracts or code pass through tools outside your control.
Per-token meters and duplicate seats make the invoice a guess.
What your architecture could look like
Every request passes one governed entry point that routes it to the model that fits.
Copilots, agents, developer tools, business apps
One endpoint, OpenAI and Anthropic compatible
Dedicated GPUs, managed in the EU
For non-sensitive work that needs them
Next step
You've seen the maths. Forty-five minutes gets you a grounded view on routing, hardware sizing, compliance and the quick wins you can book this quarter. No slides, no obligation.
FAQ
One governed entry point for every AI request in your company. Copilots, agents, developer tools and business apps all talk to a single endpoint, compatible with the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, so existing tools connect without a rewrite. Per request, the gateway decides which model may handle it, applies your policy and logs who did what.
Three partners, one accountable offering. Combell, part of team.blue, provides the dedicated GPU servers in its European datacenters. delaware designs and operates the environment, including the AI gateways, and is the single partner accountable from strategy to daily operations. imec tests and tunes the models on each customer's own use cases, with its aistack environment, so that model selection becomes an engineering decision instead of a gamble. Together that gives you capacity that is European in ownership, certification and management.
You cannot ban shadow AI. Almost half of the people using generative AI at work still do it through personal accounts, outside every policy and audit trail. What works is making the sanctioned path the easier one: good models, one login, no friction. Then usage moves onto the gateway by itself.
Not for anything that matters. Your private AI runs on dedicated capacity in European-owned data centres and models, prompts and logs stay inside your perimeter. Frontier models are only used for non-sensitive work, only when your policy allows it, and personal data is filtered out first.
For most work, yes. On coding, the best open-weight models now sit within a few points of the frontier. For the hardest reasoning, frontier models still lead. That is exactly why the gateway routes per task instead of standardising on one model, and why you can switch centrally the moment a better model appears.
Model weights are numbers, not software: a model file cannot run code, open a connection or report back. On air-gapped capacity there is simply no way out. What remains is trained behaviour, such as bias in how a model answers, so every model is tested before it goes live and the gateway applies your policy on top.
Governance is becoming a legal duty, and the gateway helps organizations document compliance with the AI Act, NIS2 and DORA. It keeps a log of every AI request, enforces a policy per model and use case, and gives evidence of where your data was processed. That is the material your auditor asks for.
No. The gateway sits in front of the providers you already use, so teams keep their tools while you gain the view and the control. It is an extra lane next to your Microsoft landscape, not a replacement, and if you run fully on Azure, the same governance layer runs on Azure API Management.
On the contrary. Moving towards your own environment provides cost transparency as you're not dependent on changing token-based pricing models. You lease the infrastructure and we make sure that you get the most tokens out of that infrastructure. In our first deployments, we saw cost savings of up to 50%
With the online assessment tool, working from your own figures: it shows today's AI cost, a 24-month projection, the possible savings and the point at which owning capacity pays off. The gateway can then stand in front of your existing AI providers and sovereign capacity is added once your volume justifies it.