Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud scales to thousands of nodes with Azure Local

I’m excited to share that Azure Local has now levelled up, enabling deployments of thousands of servers in a single sovereign environment. This advancement allows organisations to manage larger workloads locally, whether in expansive datacentres, industrial settings, or edge locations, all while keeping everything firmly within their sovereign boundaries.

For those running national infrastructure, regulated workloads, or vital services, there’s a significant transformation happening in the way cloud infrastructure is deployed and managed. As digital sovereignty demands evolve and regulatory requirements get stricter across various regions, organisations are increasingly focusing on maintaining jurisdictional control over their data, operations, and dependencies. Additionally, data-intensive applications and AI are moving closer to the data source, necessitating infrastructure that can scale effectively while ensuring compliance and data residency within sovereign settings.

Azure Local serves as the backbone of Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud, allowing organisations to operate a cloud-consistent infrastructure using their own hardware, all within their sovereign space. It supports deployments in environments that are either connected, intermittently connected, or fully disconnected. Thanks to Azure Local’s disconnected operations, customers can enforce policies and maintain role-based access control, auditing, and compliance measures locally, ensuring they have full control over how their infrastructure remains secure and updated, regardless of public cloud connectivity.

Scaling Sovereign Private Cloud

Deployments of Sovereign Private Cloud must not only accommodate larger workloads but also meet the operational needs of national infrastructure and regulated sectors. Azure Local enables organisations to expand their deployments from hundreds to thousands of servers within a single sovereign boundary, allowing the infrastructure to grow alongside demand without needing a complete architectural overhaul.

As deployment sizes increase, ensuring resilience becomes vital to maintaining uninterrupted operations for mission-critical services. Enhanced fault domains and infrastructure pools help mitigate hardware failures, preventing service outages, and ensuring essential workloads remain operational across various cloud connectivity scenarios.

At larger scales, organisations can handle data-heavy AI inference and analytics within their own premises. With the capability to support high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), sensitive models and data stay securely within the customer’s infrastructure, while access management, auditing, and compliance remain intact within the sovereign setup.

Built for Challenging Workloads

Increasing deployment sizes open up new possibilities for running large Sovereign Private Cloud setups and distributed AI workloads. This means organisations can fully manage data-intensive and latency-sensitive applications within their sovereign borders.

AT&T, a top global telecommunications provider, is leveraging Azure Local to manage mission-critical infrastructure using hardware they control. Their goal? Full operational control paired with the scalability their business requires.

“Azure Local offers the infrastructure we need to conduct critical operations at scale while ensuring governance throughout our environment. The reliability of the Azure operating model, implemented on our infrastructure, is essential as we continue to modernise and deliver dependable services to our customers.”

— Sherry McCaughan, Vice President – Mobility Core Services, AT&T

Kadaster, the Netherlands’ official land registry and mapping agency, uses Azure Local to maintain sovereign control over some of the nation’s most sensitive public data.

“As a government entity tasked with handling some of the Netherlands’ most delicate data, we require infrastructure that offers complete control over data location and governance. Azure Local has consistently provided that foundation. As our workloads have expanded in scale and complexity, the platform has scaled alongside us.”

— Maarten van der Tol, General Manager, Kadaster

FiberCop, Italy’s leading digital network operator, is implementing Azure Local across its edge locations to deliver sovereign cloud and AI services to organisations throughout the country. Fabio Veronese, Chief Information & Technology Officer, remarked:

“FiberCop is uniquely positioned to drive innovation in Italy, delivering cloud and AI services at a national scale. Azure Local supports our ambition to propel Italy’s digital future while upholding data sovereignty and compliance, especially where it matters most.”

The Infrastructure Behind Sovereign Private Cloud

Azure Local is currently available with validated compute and enterprise storage options from partners like DataON, Dell Technologies, Everpure, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, Lenovo, and NetApp. This integration allows organisations to incorporate existing Storage Area Networks (SAN) and maintain previous investments while enabling independent scaling of compute and storage resources within their sovereign environment.

At the chip level, Intel® Xeon® 6 processors provide the computing foundation for this platform. Designed for the demands of modern enterprise workloads, Xeon 6 also features built-in AI acceleration with Intel® AMX. This means organisations running inference or generative AI workloads in their sovereign setups don’t need to invest in separate, dedicated infrastructure.

With Azure Local, validated compute and storage solutions, accelerated computing capabilities, and advanced silicon working together, you can establish a data centre-scale stack that underpins sovereign infrastructure deployments, ensuring that data, models, and processing activities remain securely within customer-controlled environments.

Sovereign Infrastructure Tailored to Your Needs

Azure Local is designed to align with your specific needs, whether they involve strict data residency, disconnected operations, regulated workloads, or AI applications running close to data sources. As these requirements evolve across governments and regulated industries worldwide, Sovereign Private Cloud deployments can seamlessly expand from a singular edge node to comprehensive enterprise-scale datacentre environments, all run on hardware you own and manage, ensuring consistent lifecycle management through Azure.

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Douglas Phillips leads global engineering efforts for Microsoft’s specialised sovereign and private clouds. His responsibilities encompass Microsoft’s global strategy, products, and operations that deliver industry-leading solutions including Azure, our adaptive cloud portfolio, and Microsoft 365 collaboration suite, to customers requiring enhanced sovereignty, security, edge, and compliance capabilities.

Tags: Azure, Azure Local, Sovereign Private Cloud