Sovereign AI
Sovereign AI — the doctrine that a country must have its own compute, on its own soil, under its own law — has become in the space of about three years the organising principle of technology policy in a remarkable number of states. The European Union wants European cloud. India requires certain data to remain in India. Gulf states are building enormous capacity with the explicit aim of not being dependent. Japan, Korea, Canada, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and a dozen others have national compute programmes.
The reasoning is not primarily economic. It is that a government which cannot run its own models, on its own hardware, in its own jurisdiction, is dependent for something it believes to be as fundamental as electricity on firms and states it does not control — and that in a crisis, the location of the machine determines whose court order applies to it.
I have some sympathy with this, and notice what it does to the environmental argument, because it inverts it completely. The efficient answer — build where the power is cleanest and the climate is coolest, and serve the world from there — is exactly what a sovereignty policy forbids. Sovereign compute means building in places that are not optimal, because they are yours. It means duplicating capacity in dozens of jurisdictions that could have shared it. It means data centres in hot countries with strained grids and water they cannot spare, built for reasons that have nothing to do with any physical logic and everything to do with the fact that a nation would rather be inefficient than dependent.
We have decided this before, in other industries, and generally decided in favour of resilience over efficiency once we have been frightened enough. There is no reason to expect a different answer here. Which means the environmental optimisation — put the machines where they do the least harm — is very likely to lose, not to corporate greed, but to a perfectly comprehensible and possibly correct account of national interest.
from The Ethics of AI Data Centres (2026)
