The world's most capable AI lives behind a handful of foreign APIs: frozen models you rent, fed by data you hand over, on infrastructure you'll never control. For a single team running an experiment, that's a reasonable trade. For an organisation building its operations on AI, or a country building its public services on it, it isn't a strategy. It's a dependency.

What dependency looks like

  • A per-token tax. Every question your organisation asks is metered by someone else, at prices someone else sets.
  • A kill switch in someone else's data centre. Terms change, regions get switched off, models get retired. Your workflows go with them.
  • Knowledge that leaks outward. When intelligence is rented, the context you feed it goes to the vendor, and what's learned from your work improves their product.
  • Models you can't inspect. A frozen foundation model's weights and training data are someone else's secret. You can't audit what you can't see.

Runs on your own metal

Voltaic was designed to be owned, not rented. A spiking brain of 355M to 7B parameters runs on a single GPU today. That's not a cut-down demo; it's the same architecture that retains up to 4.2× more knowledge than dense 7B baselines on public benchmarks. And because spiking neurons only fire when there's something new to process, it will run on Verkko's own proprietary hardware at the edge tomorrow, at far less power. There's no per-token tax and no kill switch in someone else's data centre.

Your data stays yours

Because Voltaic learns continually inside your workspace, knowledge compounds on-premises. Every fact your teams teach it, and every document it learns from, makes your model better, not a vendor's. Deploy it in Verkko Cloud, in your own cloud, or self-hosted and air-gapped, with EU deployments available. Calls to cloud models happen only if you allow them, under routing rules you set.

Our own core

The spiking architecture, its weights and Living Memory are all ours, and all auditable. Where we do rely on outside components, we say so: our vision benchmarks, for example, use frozen DINOv2 features as the image encoder. That matters for sovereignty in a practical way: there's no upstream model whose licence, training data or availability we, or you, depend on. When we say we can show you which knowledge is protected and why, it's because there's no black box underneath.

Orchestrate, don't surrender

Sovereignty doesn't mean isolation. When a task genuinely needs frontier scale, Voltaic can orchestrate external models, an open model on your own hardware or a frontier API in the cloud. But the spiking core stays in control of what is shared and when. It weighs confidence, context sensitivity and complexity, then decides whether to answer itself, call a local model or reach out. Your rules sit on top: pin sensitive topics to local-only, allow-list the cloud models you trust and set policies per workspace or per user. External answers come back fused with what Voltaic knows, and every call sharpens its own memory.

Accountable by design

Owning your intelligence also means being able to answer for it. Every action Verkko takes runs through Baton, our protocol for governed AI: every step is scoped, recorded and attributed, and anything irreversible waits for a person. Baton's core has no dependency on any database, model provider or cloud, so the same guarantees hold wherever you run it.

Sovereign by design

Voltaic is engineered at the Verkko Robotics Research Lab in Europe, for organisations and nations that refuse to outsource their cognition. We think the next decade's most important infrastructure is intelligence itself, and that it should be owned by the people who depend on it.

Read more on the Voltaic page or talk to the team about self-hosted deployment.