Snowflake and STACKIT map out sovereign cloud integration

Snowflake is working with Schwarz Digits to integrate its data and AI platform with the STACKIT cloud, the company said. The roadmap is aimed at organizations in Germany seeking a sovereign deployment. Under the proposed design, customer data would be hosted on STACKIT infrastructure in the European Union, with ownership and control of the associated encryption keys kept within that environment.

The companies are targeting enterprises, public-sector bodies and regulated industries, including finance, critical infrastructure, defense, healthcare and energy. Snowflake presented the arrangement as a way for those organizations to use its platform while pursuing requirements around data location, jurisdiction and operational control.

Customer data in the planned integration would be stored in Apache Iceberg, Snowflake said. The open table format is designed for use across processing engines, and Apache Iceberg documents support for engines including Spark, Flink and Hive. According to Snowflake, this approach would let customers continue using their data with other open-source tools if the primary vendor became unavailable.

The roadmap also calls for a European encryption-key system. Snowflake’s existing Tri-Secret Secure documentation describes a separate dual-key model that combines a Snowflake-maintained key with a customer-managed key on the cloud platform hosting an account. The companies have not said the STACKIT integration will use Tri-Secret Secure. They also have not published the architecture connecting Snowflake services, STACKIT hosting, key management and Iceberg storage.

STACKIT describes itself as Schwarz Digits’ European cloud provider and says it offers external customers the cloud services used by Schwarz Group companies.

Snowflake described the integration as an ongoing roadmap. It said the planned integrations, product availability and deployment timing are forward-looking, not delivery commitments, and remain subject to development, partner agreements and regulatory processes. The announcement provides no general-availability date, pricing, eligible Snowflake edition or rollout schedule. The opened evidence also does not establish that a production Snowflake deployment is running on STACKIT.