Aleph Alpha x Linkup: sovereignty doesn't stop at the model layer
The Linkup Team
“Sovereignty doesn't stop at the model layer. It's been important to us to have a European search provider that offers GDPR compliance, zero data retention, and no data processing outside the EU. Linkup is the only one who can deliver this with an index that has sufficient quality - the quality gap for most other sovereign alternatives is simply too wide.” - Martin Feltes, Head of AI Solutions Engineering, Aleph Alpha
At a glance
Company: Aleph Alpha builds solutions and specialized large language models for critical industries and the public sector in Europe.
Problem: Aleph Alpha's sovereignty promise couldn’t stop at the model layer. Web search, a core capability for Aleph Alpha’s solutions, would need a European provider that shares the same values and promise.
Solution: Linkup as the web-search layer across Aleph Alpha's solutions, internal and customer-facing alike — EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant, zero data retention.
Result: Fully sovereign solutions, model to search, that Aleph Alpha can offer to public-sector, defense, and industrial customers without a compliance asterisk.
The challenge
Aleph Alpha's offer to critical industries rests on sovereignty: models developed and hosted in the EU, under European jurisdiction, with self-curated data that is honoring PII, copyrights, and European values, for customers who cannot risk international data exposure, such as those in the public sector, defense and regulated industries. True sovereignty can only be achieved if every layer of the stack meets the same bar.
So far web search has been the gap. Aleph Alpha's solutions needed live web access to ground answers and access real-time information, but the obvious providers route through non-EU infrastructure, thereby breaking the sovereignty guarantee.
The bar Aleph Alpha set was high: sovereignty doesn’t mean compromising on quality. This is why they were looking for high-quality search results, EU data residency, zero data retention, and of course, ensured data sovereignty.
Why they chose Linkup
In short, Linkup was the only European web search API that did not force a trade-off between sovereignty and quality.
In their search for a solution that guarantees both best-in-class performance for their customers and strict alignment with European values, Aleph Alpha encountered a consistent trade-off: providers that met data sovereignty standards fell short of the index quality set by US competitors.
Linkup delivers on:
- EU-native infrastructure. Linkup's index and infrastructure are hosted in the EU.
- Zero data retention by default, and GDPR compliance as a default rather than an add-on — a decisive factor for Aleph Alpha's positioning in the German market specifically.
- An owned index built on quality. Linkup's own proprietary index meant Aleph Alpha wasn't trading answer quality for sovereignty — the main gap it found with every other EU alternative.
- Enterprise-grade delivery, to match Aleph Alpha's production traffic.
Implementation
Aleph Alpha runs Linkup across two workflows:
- Internal search, giving Aleph Alpha's own teams a GDPR-compliant, EU-hosted search layer for internal tooling and development.
- Its customer-facing solutions, built on Aleph Alpha's own trained, specialized LLM and platform, serving industrial, public-sector, and defense customers.
The result
Using Linkup, Aleph Alpha now offers what it calls “the missing piece of the sovereign stack”: a search layer that matches the same EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant standard as its solutions and models — without compromising on quality.
