Europe has always taken data privacy, neutrality, and independence seriously. Whether you are operating in government, healthcare, banking, or energy, the message is clear: sensitive workloads need to stay within national borders. However, sovereignty shouldn’t come at the expense of innovation, agility, or cost efficiency. This is exactly where Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer (C3) steps in.

With C3, you are not forced to choose between the benefits of public cloud and the control of on-prem infrastructure. You get both. Oracle brings a consistent, fully managed OCI experience directly into your data center or trusted hosting environment.

This is cloud designed for data residency and regulatory alignment, without compromise. Customers retain full operational control thanks to Oracle’s secure Operator Control and disconnected operating model, giving you full autonomy over who can access what and when. If you don’t want Oracle to touch it, they won’t.

But this isn’t just about compliance, it’s about enabling innovation. With C3, organizations can develop once and run anywhere. You can build modern applications on OCI using containers, Kubernetes, or virtual machines (VMs), and then deploy them on-prem with C3, in a public OCI region, or any hybrid setup. This gives developers and architects freedom, without forcing the business into compliance headaches.

Even more compelling: C3 is priced the same as the public OCI regions. No “on-prem premium.” Unlike other hyperscalers that charge more for bringing cloud services into your data center, Oracle keeps the economics consistent. That means you can deploy at scale wherever you need it, without blowing your IT budget. And because OCI is up to 60% cheaper than competitors – especially for IaaS-heavy workloads and managed Kubernetes – C3 becomes not just a compliance play, but a strategic cost advantage.

For organizations already running Exadata Cloud@Customer (ExaCC), the transition to C3 is seamless. You extend the same OCI architecture from your Oracle Database infrastructure to your full application landscape – compute, storage, network, containers, and more – all under one public OCI control plane. One architecture, one operational model, full sovereignty.

And for those looking to modernize full application stacks from databases to middleware to frontend services, C3 provides the flexibility to run both Oracle and open-source technologies.

Note: Those requiring the full breadth of OCI services in a sovereign, connected environment, Oracle also offers OCI Dedicated Region. 

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated – The Next Level of Sovereignty

Oracle has taken the concept of sovereign cloud one step further. With Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated (C3I), organizations can now run cloud-native workloads in a fully air-gapped environment, without any operational dependency on Oracle. No outbound connections. No Oracle-managed control plane. No shared infrastructure. Just full autonomy and local control. C3I Oracle owned and customer/partner managed.

it’s a real, production-ready deployment model for mission-critical and highly regulated environments. Designed specifically for governments, defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure operators like Telcos, Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated addresses scenarios where even a standard sovereign cloud isn’t enough.

The platform runs the same core OCI services  (compute, storage, networking, Kubernetes) but is completely disconnected from Oracle’s global cloud infrastructure. Everything is deployed on-premises in your trusted facility, and operated entirely by your own team or a national partner under your control. Oracle is not in the loop. No telemetry is sent back. No patching happens unless you initiate it.

For Europe, this matters. Regulations are tightening. Risk tolerance is dropping. And cloud decisions now sit under the spotlight of data strategy, digital self-determination, and public trust. With C3I, organizations don’t need to compromise. You can modernize legacy infrastructure, run secure workloads, and meet the strictest data protection laws without handing over operational control to a foreign hyperscaler.

So if you’re building for maximum sovereignty, whether for a national security project, a classified analytics platform, or a regulated healthcare system, C3I gives you the control you need, without the complexity of building it all from scratch.

Note: those requiring the full breadth of OCI services in a sovereign, air-gapped environment, Oracle also offers an Isolated Region. It delivers the complete OCI stack, including advanced PaaS and data services, fully disconnected and deployed inside your own data center. It’s the natural next step when C3I isn’t enough.

Cloud-Native at Home – Modernizing Legacy Workloads on C3

Whether you are building microservices, deploying containers with Kubernetes, or refactoring legacy applications, C3 gives you the flexibility and tools to modernize at your own pace without sending data to the public cloud.

For many organizations, this is especially relevant when looking at existing on-premises environments. C3 opens a new path for modernizing applications without a full lift-and-shift. You can gradually move critical services from traditional virtual machines into containers, adopt infrastructure-as-code practices, and standardize on CI/CD pipelines. All within a compliant, in-country environment that mirrors public OCI.

Using OCI services like OKE (Oracle Kubernetes Engine) on C3, teams can deploy cloud-native apps alongside traditional workloads. It is entirely possible to run a legacy database VM next to containerized microservices, with consistent networking, storage, and security policies across both. This hybrid model is ideal for customers who want to modernize existing applications incrementally, without taking unnecessary risks.

For VMware and Nutanix customers, C3 provides a future-ready landing zone. You can continue to run VM-based workloads on OCI-compatible compute shapes and use that as the foundation to containerize where it makes sense. This avoids expensive rewrites or disruptive replatforming. Instead, C3 supports a phased modernization strategy.

Note: OKE on C3 is free. Standard OCI pricing for VM nodes applies. 

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Supports Red Hat OpenShift

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer (C3) keeps expanding its capabilities for customers, and a key recent addition is support for Red Hat OpenShift.

Artificial Intelligence on Compute Cloud@Customer

With Oracle’s announcement in February 2025, customers can add Nvidia GPUs to C3 deployments with the following key features:

• Independent scaling of GPUs, compute, and storage: up to 48 L40S NVIDIA GPUs, 6,624 OCPUs with 80.4 TB of memory, and a mix of up to 3.65 PB of high-capacity storage and 1.2 PB of high-performance storage.
• Powerful GPU VMs: up to four NVIDIA L40S GPUs, 108 Intel Xeon 8480+ CPU cores, 800-GB DDR5 memory, and 400 Gbps network bandwidth for the most demanding workloads.
• Ultra-fast network connectivity: 800-Gbps data center connectivity that can directly connect an Exadata Cloud@Customer Machine to combine the power of GPUs with Oracle Database 23ai’s integrated AI Vector Search.

EU Sovereign Operations for Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer

In May 2025, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle EU Sovereign Operations for C3. This means, that C3 now also runs in the EU Sovereign Cloud, with the same pricing and the same service you know from commercial OCI regions.

Previously, operations and automation for Compute Cloud @ Customer were handled via global OCI control planes. With EU Sovereign Operations, that changes:

• All automation and admin services now reside within Oracle’s EU Sovereign Cloud regions

• Operations are managed by Oracle teams based in the EU, ensuring compliance

• Hardware deployment and support is delivered by personnel authorized to work in the customer’s country

EU Sovereign Operations for Compute Cloud@Customer is offered with the control plane located in one of Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud regions, currently either Madrid, Spain or Frankfurt, Germany. This service is offered in European Union member countries and other select countries in Europe. The service delivers the same features, functions, value and service level objectives (SLOs) offered with Compute Cloud@Customer service with control planes from OCI Compute public regions.

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In short, Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer is not just a cloud, it’s your sovereign cloud. It gives enterprises the tools they need to stay compliant, stay competitive, and stay in control. And that is what the next generation of digital sovereignty should look like.