EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceAIHeadquarters: BG

llama.cpp: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

llama.cpp is an open-source inference engine, written in C/C++, for running large language models and vision-language models with minimal setup. It runs on a wide range of hardware: CPUs, Apple silicon and GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD and others through backends such as CUDA, Vulkan and Metal. Quantisation lets models fit into limited memory. With llama-server it provides an OpenAI-compatible API and a built-in web interface. llama.cpp is a software library with accompanying tools that you run yourself, not a hosted service.

The project was started by Georgi Gerganov and is released under the MIT licence. In 2026 the ggml team behind it joined Hugging Face, which states that llama.cpp will remain fully open source and community driven, with the team keeping technical leadership. Because inference runs entirely on your own hardware, prompts and documents need not leave your infrastructure, and no account with a vendor is required. For a European organisation this makes it a building block for self-hosted AI. The licence terms and origin of the model weights you choose remain a separate point of attention.

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Sovereignty score
92 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    No hosting in Europe (self-host)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-690
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 4, 2026
HeadquartersBG (EU)Verified by hand
Data hostingSelf-hosted, e.g. in self-host (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
CategoryAI
TypeProduct
Websitegithub.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to llama.cpp

The European alternatives to llama.cpp come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

55 European AI vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with llama.cpp

llama.cpp is headquartered in BG and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

llama.cpp hosts data outside the EU (self-host). Personal data therefore leaves the EU, which requires a transfer mechanism under the GDPR and pulls the data residency score down.

llama.cpp is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs llama.cpp together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to llama.cpp?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to llama.cpp include Aleph Alpha, Almato and Almawave. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to llama.cpp?

Our list of EU alternatives to llama.cpp is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

Is llama.cpp GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

llama.cpp is headquartered in BG (EU) and hosts data in self-host. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes llama.cpp an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 4, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in AI

AI: Artificial intelligence — large language models, translation, generative AI. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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8 European alternatives to llama.cpp — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score