The Sovereign AI Shift: Why Firms Reclaim Data Control with Postgres

WILMINGTON, Del. – January 28, 2026 – A significant shift is underway in the enterprise technology landscape, as the race to operationalize artificial intelligence collides with a growing mandate for data control. EnterpriseDB (EDB), a company specializing in the open-source database PostgreSQL, announced today that it has secured major new clients, including MNTN, Waystar, and NTT East, for its EDB Postgres AI platform. The adoption by these diverse global leaders underscores a powerful trend: businesses are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice control over their own data and AI models in exchange for the convenience of proprietary, black-box solutions.

This momentum reflects a deeper strategic realignment where data sovereignty—the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance structures within the nation it is collected—is becoming a cornerstone of corporate AI strategy. Companies are actively seeking platforms that allow them to build, train, and deploy AI agents on their own terms, within their own secure infrastructure, and without being locked into a single vendor's ecosystem.

Reclaiming Control: The Rise of the Sovereign AI Platform

The rush to integrate AI has created a critical dilemma for CIOs and CTOs. While the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are transformative, relying on opaque third-party services for mission-critical or sensitive data processing introduces significant risks related to security, compliance, and competitive advantage. In response, the concept of a “sovereign AI” platform is gaining traction, defined by its ability to provide full control over data, models, and deployment environments.

This demand is not theoretical. Recent industry studies show that a vast majority of executives believe a viable AI platform must offer this level of control. EDB's own research found that enterprises pursuing advanced AI consistently prioritize data sovereignty, hybrid deployment flexibility, and a unified data platform.

"Agentic AI changes what enterprises require from their data platform," said Kevin Dallas, CEO of EDB, in a recent statement. "It's no longer enough to bolt AI onto fragmented infrastructure or hand critical workloads to opaque proprietary stacks. Organizations seeing the highest returns are building on platforms that let them govern their data, deploy anywhere, and operationalize AI securely within their control."

This approach directly counters the model of handing over valuable enterprise data to external AI services, a practice that raises concerns about data privacy, intellectual property leakage, and regulatory adherence under frameworks like GDPR and HIPAA.

PostgreSQL: The Open-Source Engine for Enterprise AI

At the heart of this shift is the remarkable ascent of PostgreSQL, an open-source database that has evolved from a developer favorite into a trusted foundation for enterprise-grade applications. An estimated 35% of enterprises globally now consider PostgreSQL for their most complex and critical workloads, a testament to its maturity, performance, and flexibility.

Unlike proprietary databases that come with high licensing costs and restrictive terms, PostgreSQL's open-source nature provides freedom from vendor lock-in. This allows companies to customize, innovate, and scale their data infrastructure without being tethered to a single provider's roadmap or pricing model. Its robust security features, strong community support, and extensive ecosystem of extensions—such as pgvector for handling AI-specific vector data—make it an ideal backbone for building modern, sovereign data platforms.

EDB has strategically positioned itself as a key enabler of this trend, building its EDB Postgres AI platform on this open-source foundation. By being one of the most active contributors to the core PostgreSQL project, the company combines the innovation of the global community with the enterprise-grade reliability, security, and support required for mission-critical deployments.

Beyond the Hype: Real-World AI Implementations

The true measure of any technology platform is its real-world application. The diverse use cases of EDB’s newest clients illustrate how the principles of sovereign AI are being put into practice across different industries to solve concrete business problems.

In the highly regulated world of healthcare, Waystar, a payments platform supporting providers that serve roughly half of the U.S. patient population, selected EDB to power its mission-critical transaction environment. With billions of transactions processed annually, the company requires extreme reliability and strict compliance with regulations like HIPAA. "What stood out to me from working with the EDB team was the confidence and trust they inspired," stated Joshua Dove, Vice President of Technical Operations at Waystar. "We found a group of people who cared about our success... and had the depth of expertise to support us at scale." For Waystar, this sovereign approach allows them to leverage AI to improve accuracy and reduce manual work while ensuring sensitive patient data remains secure and compliant.

Meanwhile, in the fast-paced advertising technology sector, MNTN, a leading connected TV (CTV) advertising platform, turned to EDB to modernize its analytics infrastructure. Handling massive volumes of advertising data requires a platform that is both high-performance and stable. By adopting EDB Postgres AI, MNTN not only gained the necessary performance but also strategically avoided vendor lock-in. "The performance is there, the stability is there, the support is responsive—as they should be," said Greg Spiegelberg of MNTN. "It just made sense."

Across the Pacific, NTT East, a major Japanese telecommunications provider, is using EDB's platform to advance its AI-driven network operations. The company is building and deploying AI agents in private, controlled environments to autonomously detect and respond to network issues. This move is critical for managing national infrastructure where data locality and security are non-negotiable. Shota Takano, a manager at NTT East, highlighted the importance of expert support in this endeavor. "We felt uneasy introducing a new type of product on our own, but EDB's support alleviated our concerns," he noted, praising the close collaboration.

A Unified Platform for a Fragmented World

To meet these diverse needs, EDB Postgres AI is engineered as a unified platform that breaks down traditional data silos. It combines transactional systems (like payment processing), analytical workloads (like ad performance), and AI capabilities (like vector search) onto a single Postgres-native foundation. This integration allows organizations to perform rapid analytics on live transactional data and build AI applications with low-code pipelines, all while maintaining deployment flexibility across on-premises data centers, private clouds, and public multi-cloud environments.

This combination of open-source flexibility, enterprise-grade stability, and a clear focus on data control appears to be a winning formula. The decisions made by companies like Waystar, MNTN, and NTT East signal a broader market maturation, where the initial hype around AI is giving way to a more pragmatic and strategic focus on building sustainable, secure, and sovereign technology stacks. This movement is fundamentally reshaping how enterprises view their data—not as a commodity to be handed over, but as a core strategic asset to be controlled and leveraged for competitive advantage.