TLDR
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NVIDIA GTC has always been a place to connect with the partners, customers, and developers building with Haystack. When we learned that GTC was coming to Berlin, our home city, we wanted to make the most of it.
Alongside our presence at the conference, we opened our headquarters as the House of Sovereignty: a meeting place for people working to turn AI’s potential into applications that organizations can trust, improve, and operate on their own terms.
Across panels, demos, a hack night, announcements, and conversations at our booth, one theme kept connecting the week’s activities: sovereign AI takes an ecosystem. Open source developers, infrastructure providers, application builders, and the organizations putting AI to work all have a part to play.
Opening the House of Sovereignty
We transformed our Berlin headquarters into a space for our ecosystem to meet, exchange experience, and see what others are building.
At our panel with Roberto Sgnaolin, Christian Knobel, and Sven Giesselbach, we explored how organizations can combine sovereignty with fast innovation cycles. It is a practical challenge: how do you adopt new capabilities while keeping control over your data, models, infrastructure, and applications? And how do you preserve the flexibility to change those choices as technology and requirements evolve?
Demos brought those questions to life, while food, drinks, and music gave guests time to continue the conversations.
Our community hack night brought another perspective. Developers came together to build applications with Haystack, learn from each other, and work alongside the team. Bringing leaders and practitioners into the same space helped connect the decisions organizations face with the engineering work needed to make them happen.
Showing how agents can improve under human oversight
On the GTC stage, Malte Pietsch and Julian Risch presented “Evolve Within Bounds: Secure, Self-Improving Agents for On-Prem AI.”
The session addressed a challenge that becomes increasingly important once agents enter production: keeping them effective as their data, tools, and operating environment change.
During GTC, we announced an open reference architecture developed through our technical collaboration with NVIDIA. It combines Haystack orchestration with NVIDIA open models and software for optimization and governed execution.
The cybersecurity demonstration showed an agent analyzing confidential source code for vulnerabilities, with a second agent examining its runs and proposing improvements. Proposed changes are evaluated before promotion, with approval, audit, and rollback controls keeping people in charge.
For developers who want to explore a related implementation, our log-analysis agent walkthrough shows how a Haystack agent running on NVIDIA DGX Spark can analyze traces, test configuration changes, and recommend improvements using local models.
Making AI practical for critical use cases
Milos Rusic joined Andreas Simon Rueckriegel, Michael Frings, and Alexander Heinrich on stage to discuss adopting AI in critical use cases and environments with demanding security requirements.
These conversations go beyond model capability. Organizations also need to govern what an agent can access, understand how it reaches an outcome, and decide where the complete application runs.
We also announced new agent optimization capabilities and custom model services, focused on reducing the cost of operating high-quality, sovereign AI agents.
Together, these developments reflect our focus at deepset: helping teams build, run, improve, and govern AI as a complete system.
Connecting across the ecosystem
One of the week’s standout moments came when Jensen Huang and Martin Blessing, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's personal envoy for increasing foreign investment in Germany, stopped by our booth to talk about open source and sovereign AI with Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch, and the deepset team. He also took time to sign our NVIDIA DGX Spark—the very unit running a live cybersecurity agent developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and featured in our GTC announcement and presentation.
We also had the opportunity to meet Karsten Wildberger, Germany’s Digital Minister, and share the impact of deepset’s work in Europe and beyond.
We also spent time discussing joint plans with partners including n8n and Jan Oberhauser, Materna, secunet, and Schwarz Digits. Those exchanges are an important part of making AI useful in practice: connecting application expertise, infrastructure, implementation, and open source technology around real organizational needs.
Announcing the next steps for sovereign AI agents
Alongside the events and demos, we shared two announcements during GTC.
An open reference architecture for self-improving agents. Developed through our technical collaboration with NVIDIA, the architecture combines Haystack orchestration with NVIDIA open models and software for optimization and governed execution. It gives organizations a foundation for agents that can learn from feedback and propose improvements while keeping sensitive workloads on infrastructure they control, including locally controlled and air-gapped environments.
Agent optimization and custom model services. We also announced new agent cost-optimization capabilities and model services to help government, defense, and industry reduce AI operating costs while maintaining high quality. Haystack Enterprise Platform connects development, execution, optimization, and governance, with capabilities to compare operating costs, evaluate answer quality, and trace problems. Custom model services complement this work by helping organizations adapt specialized models for their applications.
NVIDIA also featured deepset in its roundup of European public sector projects using open models. The article highlights Haystack Enterprise Platform as the foundation of the European Commission’s AI@EC platform and describes our platform expansion. It also covers the planned sovereign cloud offering from secunet, NVIDIA, Red Hat, and deepset for organizations handling classified information.
Together, these announcements show how we are helping organizations build, run, improve, and govern AI while retaining control over their models, data, and infrastructure.
Carrying the work forward
GTC Berlin brought together people who often work on different parts of the same challenge. Seeing them share experience, build together, and explore new collaborations was what made the week special.
Sovereignty means having choices and being able to change them. Collaboration makes those choices stronger: more capabilities to draw on, more expertise to learn from, and more ways to bring reliable AI into production.
Thank you to everyone who visited our booth, joined us at the House of Sovereignty, built with us at the hack night, or shared their work on stage. And thank you to the deepset team, partners, customers, and community for making it all happen.
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