Molinia: sovereign data, climate-positive compute

The problem

European companies in finance, healthcare, and government face a data residency bind. The dominant data warehouses — Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery — all run on US cloud carriers, and the US CLOUD Act gives American courts the power to compel access to data anywhere a US entity touches it, regardless of where the servers sit. For regulated industries, that exposure is a compliance blocker, not a configuration option. Building a competitive, full-featured alternative on purely European infrastructure was an engineering problem nobody had solved cleanly.

What we built

Molinia is a warehouse-as-a-service covering the full data lifecycle in one product: multi-source ingestion across cloud storage, databases, and APIs (Azure, AWS, GCP, on-premises); SQL transformation with schema inference; cron-scheduled pipeline orchestration; and governance with role-based access control, row-level security, audit logging, and data lineage tracking. The entire platform runs on two European carriers — Leafcloud (Dutch-owned, Amsterdam) for warehouse compute and IONOS (German-owned) for the control plane. No US entity, no CLOUD Act surface. Built on OpenStack open standards to avoid vendor lock-in from the ground up.

Where AI earns its place

Regulated industries are exactly where AI workloads need sovereign infrastructure the most — and where most data platforms fail them. Molinia provides the foundation: a place to run AI pipelines, store model inputs and outputs, and maintain the audit trails that compliance demands, without any data crossing into US jurisdiction. Schema inference and SQL-macro scripting reduce the manual scaffolding for teams building data pipelines that feed AI systems. The platform is the substrate that makes responsible AI adoption in regulated sectors actually viable.

Approach & stack

We built Molinia on OpenStack open standards — portable by design, so the platform is never beholden to a single provider's pricing or roadmap. Credentials are stored in external secret stores, never internally. Audit trails use hash-chaining for tamper evidence, and Article 30 Record of Processing Activities (RoPA) documentation ships out of the box for GDPR compliance. SSO, SAML, and OIDC integration cover enterprise identity. Usage-based billing — per minute after a 60-second minimum, with warehouses that auto-suspend when idle — keeps costs proportional to actual use. There are no egress fees, no subscriptions, and a permanent free tier for teams getting started.

Outcome

Molinia is live at molinia.eu with a free tier and €200 in trial credits available with no credit card required. Regulated European teams now have a data platform that keeps their data structurally inside EU jurisdiction — not as a configuration choice, but as an architectural guarantee — while the compute infrastructure turns server waste heat into residential hot water rather than burning carbon to neutralise it. Sovereign infrastructure and a climate-positive footprint, without giving anything up in capability.