Blankenburg, Germany, September 15th, 2026, FinanceWire
Led by 12 Elements Director Anna Bon, the platform reveals operating energy infrastructure and a 50 MW AI/HPC campus programme in Germany
Black Vault, a European infrastructure platform for sovereign AI, energy and advanced computing developed by 12 Elements Ltd and led by Director and Co-Founder Anna Bon, today publicly disclosed the first operating and development assets behind a European infrastructure strategy that has been under execution in Germany for more than a year. Its disclosed German footprint includes operating energy infrastructure in Quedlinburg and the campus-scale Black Vault Blankenburg development in Saxony-Anhalt, together with the company’s full engineering site at blackvault.global.
Black Vault deliberately operates below the model layer. Its focus is the physical infrastructure beneath compute: energy, grid connections, storage, cooling, heat recovery, secure facilities and networks. In simple terms, Black Vault builds everything below the accelerator.
The missing layer of Europe’s AI strategy
Europe’s AI race is increasingly becoming an infrastructure race. Advanced compute is becoming critical economic infrastructure, shaping industrial competitiveness, scientific capacity and national security. Models require compute; compute requires power, grid capacity, land, cooling, capital and secure physical environments.
At the same time, European providers account for only around 15 percent of the European cloud infrastructure market. The European Commission is seeking to at least triple EU data-centre capacity within five to seven years and to mobilise 200 billion euros for AI through InvestAI. Its own assessment puts installed EU capacity at about 12.4 GW in 2025 against roughly 37 GW of expected demand in 2030, and identifies energy availability, suitable sites, financing and deployment speed among the constraints on expansion.
Europe has spent much of the past decade building rules for the digital economy. The AI infrastructure race adds a more physical question: where Europe’s compute runs, who controls the energy and facilities beneath it, and under whose jurisdiction critical workloads operate. Black Vault works at that layer, from megawatts to jurisdiction.
“Europe does not have an AI ambition problem. It has an infrastructure execution problem,” said Anna Bon, Director of 12 Elements and Co-Founder of Black Vault. “Europe has the science, engineering, industrial base and financial capacity to compete. But models alone do not create sovereignty. The next phase of the AI race will be decided by who builds and controls the energy and compute infrastructure beneath them, and ultimately by where the economic value created by that infrastructure goes. Black Vault was built to work at precisely that layer.”
From operating infrastructure to campus scale
In Quedlinburg, Black Vault’s infrastructure model already has an operating physical base. A seven-storey industrial building developed in partnership with I-Kubus GmbH has 1 MW connected through a 2 MVA transformer, 2.33 MWh of battery storage and 450 kW of photovoltaics. The site is also the base for BlackKub, Black Vault’s 1 to 3 MW regional AI compute format for industrial, research and Mittelstand workloads.
In Blankenburg, Black Vault has established Black Vault Blankenburg GmbH and advanced a campus-scale development on industrially zoned land through municipal engagement, grid planning and engineering. The first major development phase is configured around approximately 50 MW of IT capacity. A 60 MW / 110 kV grid-connection process has been underway since March 2026, following technical development of the site’s energy architecture, and cooperation with the town of Blankenburg was formalised through a letter of intent in April 2026. The current development programme provides for first data-hall delivery around the turn of 2028/29.
Together, Quedlinburg, BlackKub and Blankenburg represent the three layers of one Black Vault architecture: operating energy infrastructure, distributed regional compute and campus-scale AI/HPC infrastructure. Black Vault is advancing a broader European development pipeline, with additional locations to be disclosed as they reach the company’s publication threshold.
Compute and energy as one system
The Blankenburg campus is designed with its own substation, on-site generation, storage and flexible demand, so that compute and energy are developed together rather than arriving at a congested grid as a new load.
“AI may be digital, but its foundations are intensely physical,” said Denys Tsvaig, Co-Founder of Black Vault and CEO of 12 Elements. “Chips need power. Compute needs cooling, networks, security and land. Europe cannot talk seriously about AI sovereignty without building and controlling more of that physical layer. That is the layer we build.”
Blankenburg’s energy architecture includes a closed-loop mine-water cooling concept that consumes no potable water, heat recovery for integration with the town’s district-heating system, energy storage and local generation, on converted industrial ground rather than a greenfield site. Under Germany’s Energy Efficiency Act, data centres commissioned after 1 July 2026 must reach a PUE of 1.2 or better. Black Vault designs to the statutory number, not to a marketing target.
The same principle is emerging in the United States, where large data-centre developers have committed to fund the new generation their facilities require, and in Australia, which now expects AI infrastructure to support grid stability, limit water use and benefit host communities. Black Vault applies that logic in Europe.
Secure, governable and quantum-ready
As AI systems become more capable, the infrastructure supporting them must become more secure, auditable and governable. Black Vault’s approach to sovereignty extends beyond data residency: four physical access zones, per-layer metering, German and EU jurisdiction and facilities designed toward KRITIS and NIS2 requirements, so that sovereignty-critical workloads have a physical environment to match.
Selected areas of the Blankenburg campus are reserved for quantum-ready infrastructure, with structural isolation incorporated into the physical planning to preserve the option of supporting future hybrid classical, AI and quantum systems.
“The useful life of infrastructure is far longer than the useful life of a computing generation,” said Lars Gottschligg, Black Vault’s development partner at Blankenburg. “Cooling can be upgraded and servers replaced. Some characteristics have to be built into the site from the beginning. We build for today’s AI and HPC requirements and leave room for the architectures of the next decade.”
Alongside the disclosure, Black Vault has published “Sovereign Compute”, an essay on the ownership of Europe’s AI infrastructure, at blackvault.global.
About Black Vault
Black Vault is a European sovereign AI, energy and advanced-computing infrastructure platform developed by London-based 12 Elements Ltd (Company No. 15412509), directed by entrepreneur and investor Anna Bon. It focuses on the physical layer beneath compute: energy, land, secure facilities, cooling, heat recovery, network infrastructure and long-term technology readiness. Its disclosed sites are in Quedlinburg and Blankenburg, Germany, within a broader European development pipeline. blackvault.global