Cloudera announced Anywhere Cloud as a platform for building, deploying and scaling production-grade data and AI applications across multi-cloud, on-premises and sovereign environments, while formalizing six years of support for Cloudera 7.3.2. The two-track strategy allows large production workloads to remain on existing systems as new AI and data applications run on Anywhere Cloud. Customers on Cloudera 7.1.9 do not need to upgrade to 7.3.2 first because both versions are designed to be compatible with the new platform. Anywhere Cloud provides modular, independently managed services including Spark, Kafka and Trino, open-source and external engines, centralized zero-trust governance, data-sovereignty controls and interoperability with Apache Iceberg and Polaris catalog. Cloudera’s AI Factory strategy emphasizes enterprise systems and inference, including sovereign inference, which runs models where data is stored to improve control and potentially reduce transfer costs. The company cited a financial institution’s Know Your Customer workflow analysis and said its inference service can improve speed by up to 40% in certain environments for the same model. Cloudera is also expanding Field Deployment Engineer support, industry-specific AI blueprints and hybrid deployment capabilities to help customers move from experimentation to production while preserving existing investments.