New Proximus CEO wants to offer an alternative to American tech giants: “Build the largest edge cloud in Belgium”

After all, there is currently a lot of buzz about digital sovereignty, based on the fact that a handful of American companies have a lot of power over digital infrastructure. “If Trump lets Microsoft shut down its Azure cloud service, Eurocontrol (European air traffic control, ed.) will no longer have any airspace. That is the harsh reality,” Bijnens said.

That is why Bijnens wants to market Proximus as a reliable local partner. “We can offer not only connectivity, but also digital infrastructure,” he explains. The CEO points out that Proximus has 4,000 antenna sites, as well as buildings and street cabinets. “These can become mini data centers, because there is power and fiber everywhere.”

Bijnens thinks that 2026 will be the year in which artificial intelligence will become more physically visible, for example in cars and robotics. Proximus wants to run these AI applications on computing power in its own network, as an alternative to the large central data centers.

The plan is to create the largest “edge cloud” in Belgium, a kind of decentralized cloud. This distributed infrastructure offers more resilience, according to Bijnens. “You can blow up one data center with a drone. A distributed (decentralized, ed.) cloud is more difficult to blow up.”