EDB CEO: The AI Platform Race Is Accelerating, and Sovereign Control Will Separate Winners in 2026

As OpenAI bets on Postgres^® and Snowflake moves to bypass traditional cloud gatekeepers, Kevin Dallas asserts that nearly one-third of the market will reach "escape velocity" with agentic AI through sovereign control by year-end.

"If you haven't yet made sovereignty a strategic priority, expect that nearly one-third of your competitors will have taken flight while you're still on the runway," says Dallas.

WILMINGTON, Del., Feb. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As the whole world enters a massive architectural realignment of how tech is deployed, used, and managed, EnterpriseDB (EDB) CEO Kevin Dallas cautions that 2026 marks an irreversible inflection point: The agentic AI era is no longer being defined by models; it is being defined by sovereign data platforms.

According to Dallas, this shift toward sovereign AI is already delivering up to 5x higher ROI than fragmented, vendor-locked approaches.

"Recent moves by industry leaders prove that the winners are no longer waiting for cloud providers to hand them a roadmap. They are building their own," says Dallas.

Sovereignty is already delivering 5x ROI

While only 13% of organizations achieved true AI and data sovereignty in 2025, those leaders realized five times the ROI of their peers. Dallas contends that by the end of 2026, nearly 30% of enterprises will reach "sovereign maturity," more than doubling this group of high performers in just 18 months.

And that figure is expected to reach 95% within the next three years, underscoring the global urgency of a sovereign, hybrid infrastructure.

"When OpenAI doubles down on the extensibility of Postgres to solve its most complex scaling challenges, it validates what we've said all along: The future of AI is open, extensible, and sovereign. You need a platform that doesn't just 'run' in the cloud but is independent of it—sovereign by design and built on open source foundations."

Managing the $17 trillion agentic flywheel

Dallas notes that the agentic era is arriving faster than most are prepared for, with viral signals such as Moltbook highlighting a future in which agents interact with other agents in near real time.

Industry leaders are increasingly warning that infrastructure is the new bottleneck for this transformation.

"The companies that are not set up to adopt AI coworkers very quickly will be at a huge disadvantage," says Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. 

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang echoes this, emphasizing that AI is now a strategic asset: "Build your own AI; take advantage of your fundamental natural resource, which is your data. You must have your intelligence part of your own ecosystem, not someone else's."

To capture a share of the estimated $17 trillion AI economic opportunity, Dallas argues that enterprises must move from "accidental infrastructure" to intentional, sovereign platforms that allow for "digital leashing"—the ability to maintain strict oversight and control over AI agents, ensuring they remain tethered to corporate governance, security protocols, and specific operational boundaries.

Meeting the sovereign moment: EDB Postgres AI

Last summer, Forbes contributor Peter Cohan predicted the limitations of the "rental" model, suggesting that the massive data deals of cloud giants might not pay off for the enterprise:

"Before launching artificial intelligence agents, businesses want control over their data. Despite catch-up acquisitions, Salesforce, Databricks, and Snowflake could lose that race to EnterpriseDB," said Cohan in his June 2025 article.

Today, that prediction is reality. Enterprises are realizing they cannot rent their future—they must own their stack.

"As agentic use cases move from experimentation to production, organizations are placing greater emphasis on control, security, and flexibility. EDB Postgres AI, an enterprise-grade sovereign data and AI platform built on Postgres, is designed to help organizations run and protect agentic workloads across environments," says Devin Pratt, Research Director, IDC.

EDB's leadership in this space has become the industry's reference point. The company authored the first-ever definitive guide to this shift, Building a Data and AI Platform with PostgreSQL. Underscoring the urgency of this new architecture, the book will be distributed to all 25,000 attendees at NVIDIA's GTC event in March, serving as the essential blueprint for the sovereign AI era.

These themes are explored further in EDB's report 26 Predictions for 2026: The Year AI and Data Take Flight, which outlines how sovereign AI platforms will redefine enterprise competitiveness over the next 12 months.

About EDB
EDB Postgres^® AI (EDB PG AI) is the first open, enterprise-grade sovereign data and AI platform—secure, compliant, and scalable, on premises and across clouds. Built on Postgres, the world's leading database, EDB PG AI unifies transactional, analytical, and AI workloads, enabling organizations to operationalize their data and LLMs while maintaining control over sovereign environments. EDB PG AI is supported by a global partner network and delivers up to 99.999% availability as well as hybrid management and a built-in AI factory. As one of the most active contributors to the PostgreSQL project, EDB is deeply invested in the vitality of the global community. To learn more, visit www.enterprisedb.com.

EnterpriseDB and EDB are registered trademarks of EnterpriseDB Corporation. Postgres and PostgreSQL are registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada and used with their permission. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.

Media contact:
Steph McGuirk
Interdependence
[email protected]
(845) 269-8868

SOURCE EnterpriseDB