Qlik embraces AWS European Sovereign Cloud and announces new lakehouse and AI features

Qlik is preparing for a European sovereign cloud rollout via AWS and ties this news to updates for Open Lakehouse and a new agent experience in Qlik Cloud.

Qlik will become one of the launch partners for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which will go live in Germany by the end of this year. The data specialist plans a European investment of 1.5 billion dollars over five years and will make its data and analytics platform available in the new EU-managed cloud from 2026.

European customers will thus gain access to Qlik Cloud with data processing and support from the EU, including options for their own encryption keys and a package of European certifications under development, such as BSI C5 and NIS2-related checks.

Qlik hopes to ride the growing demand within Europe for data sovereignty. By linking the offering to AWS’s sovereign cloud, Qlik can position its offering in that context. An important caveat remains that no infrastructure provider headquartered in the US can offer a truly sovereign solution. The Cloud AI Act applies there, allowing the US to compel companies (including cloud providers like AWS) to transfer data, even when it is located in the EU.

Open Lakehouse

In addition to the cloud plans, Qlik is expanding its Open Lakehouse offering. The service will receive streaming ingestion and real-time transformations for Apache Iceberg tables. Data streams from, among others, Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon S3 will now land directly in Iceberg tables with automatic quality checks, lineage, and cataloging.

Qlik is also adding extra integrations, including support for Snowflake Open Catalog, improved compatibility with Apache Spark, and zero-copy mirroring to Databricks and Amazon Redshift. The new lakehouse features will be rolled out from the first quarter of 2026.

Agents and MCP

Furthermore, Qlik is launching a private preview of an agent experience in Qlik Cloud. Through Qlik Answers, users can combine analytical data and documents in one conversation, supported by reasoning language models and calculations from the Qlik engine. The interface displays citations and explanations for conclusions and functions as a sidebar within Qlik Cloud.

Qlik is simultaneously working on the Model Context Protocol server, which is expected to become generally available in early 2026. MCP provides external assistants access to Qlik features, enabling the use of data and analytics capabilities within a Qlik tenant. The various innovations will be phased in from early 2026.