3verest uses Equinix to build sovereign AI for healthcare

3verest is using Equinix Fabric Geo Zones to build sovereign AI infrastructure for healthcare organisations, aiming to keep medical imaging data and related AI activity within national borders.

The arrangement extends 3verest's approach beyond data storage to the broader flow of AI workloads. It is intended to help hospitals, medical imaging providers, healthcare technology vendors and government health bodies keep AI inference, prompts and network traffic within the relevant jurisdiction.

The issue is becoming more pressing as healthcare providers use AI tools to analyse scans and other clinical information. In regulated sectors, providers must account not only for where records are stored, but also where models process requests and how traffic moves across networks.

3verest operates a healthcare cloud focused on sovereign deployments across Australia, the UK, Germany, the US, Canada and the European Union. Its platform supports more than 200 customers across 21 markets, with sovereign points of presence in Australia, the UK, the US, Canada and the European Union.

Equinix Fabric Geo Zones is designed to enforce geographic restrictions at the network layer between clouds and providers. This allows network traffic to remain within approved boundaries even during failover or rerouting, which can create compliance concerns when data paths change unexpectedly.

For healthcare groups handling imaging and clinical data, that distinction matters because a sovereign cloud setup can be undermined if related AI requests or interconnection traffic cross a border. The model is intended to preserve jurisdictional control across the full AI workflow, not only at the point of storage.

Platform buildout

As part of that expansion, 3verest is developing several healthcare AI products. These include Bifrost, a sovereign AI environment for healthcare; Forge, a developer platform for radiology vendors, AI developers and healthcare organisations; and Heimdall, a control layer between healthcare applications and AI models.

Heimdall is intended to route prompts, apply guardrails and direct requests to the appropriate models while keeping data within a defined boundary. Forge is built on Firecracker micro-VM technology, while Bifrost combines GPU infrastructure, retrieval-augmented generation, AI models and managed AI services for healthcare use cases.

Scott Crawford, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at 3verest, outlined the company's view of the compliance shift created by AI.

"Healthcare doesn't need another cloud. It needs infrastructure built around sovereignty from the ground up. The industry has spent years asking where data is stored, but AI changes the question to where intelligence runs. Patient imaging, clinical prompts, and AI inference must remain inside the jurisdiction, not just the archive. Equinix gives us the global digital infrastructure to build sovereign healthcare clouds consistently across multiple countries, while Fabric Geo Zones extends those guarantees to the network itself. That means our customers can adopt AI with confidence, knowing sovereignty is designed into every layer of the platform, not added afterwards," Crawford said.

Broader question

Equinix said the same network control principle applies beyond healthcare to other regulated industries. It argued that sovereignty can no longer be treated as a setting within one cloud provider when applications and AI systems are distributed across multiple environments.

Arun Dev, Vice President of Digital Interconnection at Equinix, said: "AI is fundamentally changing what sovereignty means. Organisations must now govern not only where data is stored, but how it moves between clouds, applications, and AI services. Sovereignty cannot be a setting inside a single cloud. It must be enforced at the network layer across every provider and every connection. That's exactly what Fabric Geo Zones delivers. 3verest demonstrates how healthcare organisations can embrace sovereign AI while maintaining the security, compliance and operational resilience required for highly regulated clinical environments. The same principle applies to other sovereignty-critical sectors, including financial services, where data control, regulatory compliance and operational continuity are equally non-negotiable."

Equinix operates more than 280 IBX data centres across 77 metropolitan areas in 36 countries. Fabric Geo Zones is available in markets including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, the UK, the US and the European Union.

Through that footprint, 3verest can privately interconnect with healthcare providers, original equipment manufacturer partners and cloud services while maintaining jurisdictional controls over sensitive healthcare data, the companies said.