Rust, Data and AI at Adyen: the first Rust AI meetup in Europe

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 so many more." Rust.ai began in July with ten companies presenting at AWS Builder Loft in San Francisco; this was the technology festival's first stop abroad.

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.

The arc of the evening

The three talks moved from the platform that adopted Sail, to the engine itself, to a European builder who chose Rust for sovereignty rather than speed.

• Zemin Piao (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) presented AI-native Spark Ecosystem in Rust. Sail is the rebuild of Apache Spark from the ground up in Rust, started by LakeSail's co-founders: 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 (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.

The evening ended with a community hot mic: one-minute announcements about startups, hiring, and events.

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.

Where it lives

• Event: Rust, Data and AI at Adyen, September 9, 2026
• Listings: Luma, cross-listed on the Amsterdam Sail User Group on Meetup
• Hosts: Alexy Khrabrov, Philip Gast, Shehab Amin, and Zemin Piao

Rust.ai is a new global community. If you are building Rust AI in Europe, the call for proposals is open.