On September 9, 2026, the evening before PyData Amsterdam, LakeSail and Adyen hosted the first Rust AI and LakeSail meetup in Europe at Adyen's office on the Rokin. The invitation set the frame: the most exciting AI infra is now built in Rust with Python APIs, think LakeSail, LaserData, Pydantic, CocoIndex, Columnar, and many more. Rust.ai began in July with ten companies presenting at AWS Builder Loft in San Francisco; this was its first stop abroad, held through a nationwide Dutch transportation strike, with the AI Foundry co-hosting and the 2018 Rethink Trust attendee list restored to invite the city's engineers.
The centerpiece was a production story. Adyen and LakeSail presented the deployment of Sail, a complete reimplementation of the Spark ecosystem in Rust, including Spark Connect, Delta Lake, and Iceberg, behind the same PySpark API that Adyen's platform already exposed.
Zemin Piao of Adyen opened with Evolving Spark at Adyen: how Adyen made a shared Spark platform priority-aware, Kubernetes-native, and observable, then let AI read the event logs, and put a Rust engine behind the same PySpark API. Zemin has been six years at Adyen, six years on Spark, and, per the agenda, has a six-year-old cat.
Shehab Amin and Heran Lin, LakeSail's co-founders, presented AI-native Spark Ecosystem in Rust together for the first time. Sail is the rebuild of Apache Spark from the ground up in Rust: native Delta and Iceberg tables and catalogs, Apache DataFusion, Apache Arrow and Flight SQL, a Celeborn shuffle reborn in Rust, and an actor architecture.
Robin Everaars of HOIST IT closed with Data Sovereignty and Rust?! Robin builds sovereign, portable data platforms for Dutch mental healthcare, municipalities, and defence, one of them air-gapped for a defence programme. Ten years inside the Microsoft ecosystem taught him how quietly the way out closes, so every platform HOIST IT builds is portable by design. He is not a Rust developer, and contributes to LakeSail with AI assistance anyway.
Read together, the three talks are the European version of the Rust AI argument. A payments company at Adyen's scale can put a Rust engine behind PySpark without a rewrite. The engine is a complete ecosystem, not a fast corner of one. And for organizations that must be able to leave any vendor, a Rust engine they can run anywhere is a sovereignty decision, not a performance one.
Alexy Khrabrov's field notes on the evening, recorded after the trip, are a struct.fm episode: Notes from the first Rust AI meetup in Europe, at Adyen. The recordings are below. Rust.ai is a new global community; if you are building Rust AI in Europe, the call for proposals is open at pair.rs/rust-ai-cfp.