AI and GPU workloads through OCRE

Research data that cannot leave European jurisdiction can still be trained on, fine-tuned and served. Exoscale runs the GPUs, VSHN operates the platform around them, and both are procured through the GÉANT OCRE 2024 framework with a 10% discount on compute and storage.

Which AI models are available?

OCRE procures cloud services, not models, so the framework itself has no model catalogue and no model approval list. What you procure here is an open platform: you choose the model, Exoscale and VSHN run it on European hardware.

• Dedicated Inference serves any model on Hugging Face, public, gated or private, and your own weights next to them. In practice that means the families research teams ask about: Apertus, the Swiss AI foundation model, alongside Llama, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek and Gemma, with Whisper for speech and open embedding models for RAG. Exoscale's own documentation names openai/gpt-oss-20b, openai/gpt-oss-120b and Qwen3-Coder-480B as examples of what teams deploy there. Neither list is a catalogue; both illustrate a service that runs anything on Hugging Face.
• GPU servers run whatever you build on top: a fine-tuning job, your own vLLM or llm-d deployment, a training run across several cards.
• What decides whether a given model fits is GPU memory in the zone you pick, from 16 GB on a V100 to 8x 288 GB on a B300 HGX, not an approval list.

Closed models are the exception. GPT-4, Claude and Gemini are not part of this offering: their weights are not licensed for hosting outside their vendors and those vendors' own clouds, so through OCRE they are reachable only via a hyperscaler offering, with the CLOUD Act exposure the rest of this page exists to avoid.

Send us the model or the model size, the expected load and the zone, and you get a written estimate back.

Request a trial voucher

Dedicated Inference

Available now. Run any Hugging Face model as a production API endpoint on dedicated European GPUs.

• OpenAI-compatible API, so existing tooling and SDKs work unchanged
• Public, gated or private models; weights cached in Exoscale object storage
• Exoscale operates the GPUs, the Kubernetes underneath, the load balancers and the model serving
• Manual replica scaling and scale-to-zero, so an endpoint costs nothing while idle
• Billed per GPU-second by GPU model, no per-token charge and no upfront fee, plus model storage
• 99.95% monthly endpoint availability SLA from Exoscale, with service credits

Available in at-vie-2, ch-dk-2, de-fra-1 and hr-zag-1.

Current list prices are on exoscale.com; the OCRE discount applies on top.

GPU servers

Billed per second, with NGC containers, Terraform support, and GPU node pools that attach to an SKS Kubernetes cluster so ML pipelines schedule onto GPUs like any other workload.

The RTX A5000 machines in Vienna are liquid-cooled and their waste heat is recovered.

Vector search, today

Retrieval-augmented generation needs somewhere to put the embeddings, and both options are managed services rather than something your team runs:

• Managed PostgreSQL with pgvector, in every zone, included in the plan price
• Managed OpenSearch with vector search, for semantic search at scale

Together with Dedicated Inference, that is a complete RAG stack inside EU and Swiss jurisdiction, with no data leaving it.

Managed Inference: announced, not yet available

Exoscale has announced a per-token managed inference service with a curated catalogue of production-ready models behind a managed API: no GPUs to size and no idle cost. Planned coverage includes assistants, coding models, small models, embeddings, OCR and speech, deployed in Europe and Switzerland.

The waitlist is open and the service is not yet generally available. If it would change your architecture, tell us and we will put you on it.

Why this matters for research

Hyperscaler AI services raise the same Schrems II questions as any other US-owned processing, and a grant condition or an ethics approval that requires European data residency does not bend for a model endpoint. Every component here runs in a zone you choose, operated by companies with no US parent.

Ask us for a written estimate for your workload, or a trial voucher to benchmark your own model before committing.