Fireworks and Era4 partner to bring open-model AI to enterprises across the UK and Europe

The partnership combines Fireworks’ model training and inference platform with infrastructure owned and operated by Era4 in the UK. The companies will initially explore joint solutions for financial services, insurance and life sciences. 

“Companies want AI they can specialise to their own data and the way they work,” said Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks. “They also want a choice about where those models run. This agreement with Era4 expands our capacity in the UK for developing new services with for banks, fintechs, UK enterprises, and other regulated businesses.” 

Fireworks serves more than 40 trillion tokens a day, with over 95% of that volume coming from models specialised on customers’ own data. This new UK capacity comes as Fireworks expands its UK office, adding to a footprint that already includes deployment regions in Germany and Iceland. 

For the proposed enterprise services, the companies will explore: 

“Europe has the talent, the data and the demand to lead in enterprise AI, but it cannot lead on compute it does not control. For a bank or insurer, knowing where its AI runs is part of the buying decision,” said Tom Humphreys, CEO of Era4. “At Chesterfield, we own and operate the infrastructure, including behind-the-meter power generation. Working with Fireworks lets us build on that foundation with tools enterprises can use to adapt and run open models.” 

"Enterprises across the UK and Europe are moving from AI experimentation to production, and they need the compute, the data sovereignty, and the model flexibility to do that at scale,” said Rod Evans, EMEA Vice President for Supercomputing and AI Cloud Infrastructure. “Fireworks and Era4 are bringing all three together on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra infrastructure - giving regulated industries a path to deploy specialised AI models in UK-owned, UK-operated facilities. That's exactly the kind of foundation that lets enterprises move AI into the services their customers depend on." 

Chesterfield uses direct liquid-cooled HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 servers in an HPE AI Mod POD modular data centre. Most of its electricity comes from landfill gas captured and used to generate power on site, with a grid connection as backup. Generating their own power means Era4 has been able to deploy infrastructure at Chesterfield quickly, bypassing grid constraints.  

Alongside Chesterfield, Era4 has a portfolio of more than 40 sites across the UK with similar potential for energy generation, providing a clear pathway for future expansion.