Promotiedagen 2025: the northern Netherlands takes action on its digital future

Promotiedagen at Martiniplaza served as the stage for everything happening in the northern Netherlands around AI, digital infrastructure, and sovereignty. As an innovative Groningen-based company, Duocast had a visible presence and was proud to contribute to the region's digital direction.

AI and infrastructure converge

Promotiedagen also featured considerable attention for the arrival of the AI Factory. Various consortium partners, including the University of Groningen (RUG) and the UMCG, will form the foundation of this AI incubator — the place where computing power and knowledge come together for responsible and innovative work with AI. At the same time, awareness is growing that digital sovereignty is not just about applications, but also about control over the infrastructure on which everything runs.

This is reflected in the northern initiative Cloud of the North, a collaboration in which education, government, and business are building an independent cloud environment for the region. Duocast is part of this initiative, because we believe it is becoming increasingly important to consider the various dependencies involved and that digital independence starts at the physical layer: the total infrastructure on which everything rests.

Duocast Connect+: infrastructure for an AI-driven future

That is precisely why we were at the fair with Duocast Connect+. This powerful fibre connection between Groningen and Amsterdam is designed for organisations working with data-intensive applications such as AI, medical imaging, or real-time monitoring. The infrastructure is redundant with low latency, ultra-fast (starting capacity 800 Gbps, scalable to 32 Tbps), and built with the most modern European equipment.

Or, as Wijnand Aalderink, Programme Manager at Samenwerking Noord, aptly summarised:

"This hyper-data highway makes the distance between Groningen and the Randstad a non-issue for data-driven businesses."

For us, Duocast Connect+ is more than a product. It is a building block for a future in which it does not matter where a business is located — if the connection is right, so are the opportunities.

Collaboration as a foundation

Promotiedagen showed that the northern Netherlands is not sitting back but actively building its own digital infrastructure. In our view, this is not just necessary — it is the logical course of action: in a world where technology is accelerating, you can only keep pace by working together. This message echoed across many stands.

As Duocast, we are proud to count ourselves as part of Samenwerking Noord. We look forward to further collaboration with partners in the region, from AI projects and sovereign cloud solutions to the networks that make them possible. The digital future has already begun, and we are ready for it.