Rick Pijpers (1967) is director of the Nederlandse Soevereine Datacenter Coöperatie (NSDC) and a recognised expert in digital infrastructure and data centres. Since the 1990s he has been committed to the development and strengthening of Dutch digital infrastructure, with a strong focus on digital sovereignty, connectivity, and the strategic position of data centres for AI inference in the Netherlands.
As the AI transition accelerates, Rick has positioned himself at the intersection of infrastructure policy, energy, and economic strategy. The NSDC works to ensure that the Netherlands maintains sovereign control over the digital layer that underpins its economy — an increasingly urgent mission as compute demand for AI inference scales beyond what current infrastructure was designed for.
Rick brings a perspective that is both technical and deeply political: the choices being made today about where AI runs, on whose hardware, and under whose jurisdiction will define the competitive position of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area for the next generation.
The conversation about AI in the MRA tends to focus on use cases, skills and strategy. But Rick Pijpers argues that the region is missing the deeper problem: we lack sovereign control over the compute infrastructure that makes AI inference possible at scale.
In this keynote, Rick maps out what it actually means to run AI in the Netherlands — what infrastructure exists, what doesn't, where the dependencies lie, and what the consequences are if the region continues to rely on foreign hyperscalers for the most critical layer of its digital economy.
This is not a talk about technology. It is a talk about strategic autonomy — and about the decisions the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area needs to make now, while the window is still open.
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