In the fast-moving world of AI, reliable and powerful infrastructure is the foundation of every innovation. But what does the journey of an ambitious AI pioneer look like when standard cloud solutions fall short or become too costly? Thomas Kluiters and Raoul Ritter, co-founders of Dutch AI company Reson8, talk about their distinctive vision for AI voice technology, the choices they made around compute power and hardware, and why they chose NorthC as the home for one of the most powerful GPU clusters in the Netherlands.
Reson8: the Netherlands’ most powerful AI voice model runs in a NorthC data center
The demand for accurate voice technology
Reson8 builds and trains its own advanced AI models for speech recognition and speech synthesis. The company grew out of the healthcare sector. Kluiters and Ritter noticed that generic, off-the-shelf voice models often fell short as soon as specific jargon, names, street names, or local European languages and dialects came into play. “Generic voice models tend to fill in too much on their own, instead of transcribing exactly what was actually said. Our focus is on maximum recognition and accuracy, regardless of sector or language,” Kluiters explains.
In the photo: the Reson8 team
Reson8’s mission
Reson8 has a clear mission: to give organizations the best possible voice models, tailored to the specific context of a conversation. What started as speech support for GPs and triage services quickly grew into demand from a wide range of sectors, from financial services and customer service at large organizations to automated reception services.
“NorthC never says ‘no.’ It’s always ‘yes, and we’ll do our best to make it work.’ They really think along with us.”
Thomas Kluiters, Co-Founder Reson8
Why the cloud falls short
Training advanced AI models for speech recognition and synthesis places extremely high demands on compute power, network speeds, and storage capacity. These demands presented Reson8 with two major challenges:
- Cost and scalability: training large-scale AI models on public cloud platforms simply becomes unaffordable at high volumes.
- Extremely high throughput and high density: training these kinds of models requires extensive speech datasets and the latest generation of NVIDIA AI processors, combined with data transfer speeds of up to 200 Gbps and petabytes of storage.
To keep the required compute power affordable while retaining full control over how hardware and software work together, Reson8 decided to acquire its own compute clusters. With capacity now growing toward nearly 150 GPUs (all NVIDIA Blackwell), Reson8 has built one of the largest specialized AI computing systems in the Netherlands.
The choice for owned hardware in a local data center
Choosing to own the hardware immediately raised a new question: where do you house such high-performance, energy-intensive AI infrastructure? For Reson8, the priorities were clear:
- High power density (high-density compute): An AI cluster with the latest GPUs requires a great deal of power per rack. That power demand has to be supported by the facility where the cluster runs.
- Ultra-low latency: voice applications require real-time response times. In Europe, Reson8 aims for a latency of no more than a few milliseconds. That means the facility needs high-quality connectivity.
- Direct control and flexibility: Reson8 wanted to keep full control of its physical infrastructure and network setup in-house, without bringing in additional managing parties.
That made the decision clear: colocation, placing its own custom-configured AI hardware in a professional, well-secured data center.
The search for a partner, and the choice for NorthC
In the search for the right data center partner, experience, speed, and a personal touch proved decisive. Kluiters already knew NorthC and knew the organization keeps its lines of communication short and can move fast. In the AI world, requirements can change at breakneck speed. If a company needs an extra 100 kW of power within a few weeks, a slow, bureaucratic response simply isn’t acceptable. Based on his previous experience, Kluiters knew NorthC responds quickly and has the can-do mentality Reson8 needed. “NorthC never says ‘no.’ It’s always ‘yes, and we’ll do our best to make it work.’ They really think along with us.” NorthC also fully met the strict requirements around power density, latency, and direct control.
That’s part of why Reson8 doesn’t see its relationship with NorthC as a standard client-supplier arrangement, but as a genuine partnership. Working together around events and having short lines with the team in Rotterdam make the difference.
Sovereignty is about quality and control
Digital sovereignty has become one of the most important themes in the IT sector. Because Reson8 keeps its hardware entirely in-house, the company has achieved ISO 27001 certification and can meet all required security standards. Data is also processed directly without permanent storage, which offers privacy guarantees for sensitive sectors. With an AI cluster in NorthC’s Rotterdam data center, Reson8 now has a solid Dutch foundation, while NorthC’s presence across Europe gives Reson8 room to grow internationally.