VivoPower has signed a sovereign AI data center pact, though the report does not disclose the counterparty, capacity or terms.

VivoPower PLC (NASDAQ:VIVO, FRA:51J) shares surged as much as 40% to $3.10 in early Wednesday trading after the company signed a heads of agreement with Open Innovation AI to develop secure sovereign AI data centers totaling at least 1 gigawatt over three years.

Investors appear to be responding to the scale of the opportunity. The partners see an initial sovereign AI market of more than 40 gigawatts in Europe alone, spanning government administration, defense, medical, educational and financial services cloud, with further demand across the Gulf Cooperation Council region and Asia.

The deal also gives VivoPower a complete offering. VivoPower will lead site development, power procurement and facility operations, while UAE-based Open Innovation AI supplies the orchestration, AI operations and security layer.

VivoPower CEO Kevin Chin said the pairing lets the company offer sovereigns a solution "from powered land to production-ready AI."

VivoPower already has assets to build on, including its site in Mo i Rana, Norway, and powered land and data center infrastructure in Finland and the UAE. Open Innovation AI's platform runs across private cloud, on-premises and air-gapped environments and is not tied to any single hardware vendor or hyperscaler.

As a first step, VivoPower will deploy Open Innovation AI's software across its portfolio and Nordic pipeline, with individual projects to advance under separate agreements.