What The F*** Is Sovereign AI?
Separating reality and illusion
For at least two years, I have been observing something strange in the world of geopolitics. Nations are chasing sovereignty. However, to achieve sovereignty, they are increasing their reliance on the very nations they want to distance themselves from.
This is a paradox.
The best example of this is with “sovereign AI” and “technological sovereignty.”
Everybody is invoking these phrases: Malaysia’s $250 million chip tie-up with Arm, South Korea’s almost $400 million sovereign AI project, Europe’s Gaia-X (cloud computing) or the proposed European Sovereign Tech Fund, and America’s OpenAI for Countries, to name a few.
Except, while it may be sovereign governments or businesses designing the roadmaps, when it comes to execution, little is locally produced.
EuroAmerican AI
Take Europe.
The biggest sovereign AI projects in Europe are being built by American companies, like OpenAI (Stargate Norway) or Microsoft’s move to boost its data center footprint in Europe by 40% within two years. Some may say this is a victory, that European data will be stored on servers on the continent. But, notice the nuance: European data will be stored in servers in Europe, not European data will be stored on European servers. The latter is true technological sovereignty; the former is a runner-up medal approach.
Making matters worse for Europe, there is no stopping European data stored on local servers from being accessed by America. In July 2025, Microsoft warned that it could not guarantee this kind of commitment due to the US Cloud Act, which gives Washington access to data held by US corporations, regardless of where it is held or stored.
Put simply, even “half sovereignty” (i.e., storing European data on servers built by American companies) does not guarantee security.
Sovereign Shortfall
This is the state of play across the world when it comes to sovereign AI. Supplying foreign-built AI locally does not make it sovereign. Storing local data on foreign-built servers is not sovereignty.
The world is walking down a tricky path. Greyness should not overshadow the black-and-white.
Sovereignty often times does not have a clear definition. But projects that do not bolster sovereignty are easy to spot. The truth is, there is no such thing as sovereign AI or sovereign technology if everything is still supplied by foreign firms. Until Europe builds its own servers, housing European AI that hundreds of millions of Europeans use (and choose), there is no sovereign AI. Even if South Korea builds a local LLM, it could still depend on Nvidia (American) chips. As South Korea seeks a local chip sector, the entire manufacturing processes and designs are being supplied by a British company (Arm).
US, China Stuck
Even the pinnacle of sovereign rallying cries today, the US, has major gaps. The US nuclear energy rollout, to power its sovereign AI projects, is being built and funded by Japan as part of Tokyo’s $550 billion investment pledge to America. If the energy to power the AI is built up by Japanese companies, how sovereign is America’s entire AI ecosystem?
China is already locked in this trap. In recent years, Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, has been placed in a grouping of Chinese companies driving the country’s self-reliance, alongside Huawei, DeepSeek, Baidu, Tencent, SMIC, and others. There was even talk of Alibaba developing its own internal chips to phase out American technology. However, as the US restarts Nvidia H200 chips, Alibaba may purchase 40,000 AMD chips to power its AI ambitions. Is China becoming hooked on US technology again?
Necessary Reexamination
This is not a critique of global AI projects, business lingo, or the global push toward sovereignty. Rather, it is a wake-up call that in a world rapidly deteriorating, where disruptions are at every corner, true security and stability are more important than ever before.
If governments believe they have achieved sovereignty, when the reality on the ground paints a different story, they are in for a rude awakening down the line.
Eventually, another geopolitical fight will begin, disrupting friend and foe. At that moment, sovereignty could define who stands or who is toppled. And those who only went halfway might be the first to fall.
-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”
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