Vendor-neutral AI infrastructure advice.

Why vendor-neutral matters

Most AI hardware advice in Europe today comes from someone who also wants to sell you the hardware. NVIDIA partner, Supermicro reseller, distributor for a specific liquid-cooling vendor — they all have incentives that aren’t yours. We deliberately stay out of the reselling business so we can name names: which appliance, which GPU configuration, which storage tier, which cooling approach, which support contract.

What we cover

• AI appliances — integrated turnkey boxes from various Asian and European vendors. Useful when your IT team is small.
• AI workstations — desk-side GPU machines for research and small-team inference. Sweet spot for many law firms and engineering offices.
• AI servers — rack-mounted production inference. Sizing, redundancy, cooling, power, networking, support.
• Storage tier design — embeddings, model weights, training data, hot vs cold tiers.
• Networking — East-West for GPU clusters, North-South for application traffic, segmentation for data sovereignty.
• Edge AI — for manufacturing, industrial inspection, on-device inference.
• Cooling decisions — when air is enough vs when liquid actually pays back the operational complexity.
• Cloud vs on-prem TCO — concrete 3-year models comparing your real workload across Azure Germany / AWS Frankfurt / Hetzner Dedicated / your own server room.

Asia-Europe network

We maintain a working network of European and international AI hardware and software vendors. When it makes sense for your project we make introductions — without ever taking a reseller margin.

How an engagement runs

1. Requirements workshop — performance, residency, budget, support, timeline.
2. Reference architecture — the technical configuration we’d recommend, with reasoning.
3. Vendor shortlist — 3 to 5 specific products from named vendors, with pricing if available.
4. TCO model — 36-month spreadsheet including hardware, power, support, change management.
5. Procurement support — tender documents, vendor scoring, contract review.
6. Optional: deployment supervision — on-site sanity check during installation, optional retainer for the first 90 days.

Pricing

This service is scope-priced rather than fixed-price — the work varies too much between a single AI workstation evaluation (a few days) and a full Mittelstand on-prem deployment plan (several weeks). Most engagements bundle naturally with the Private AI service line.