digital sovereignty

In depth

Three questions to separate

The word gathers three questions that are better separated before being discussed. The first is location: where does the data physically sit, and where is it processed. The second is applicable law: which authority can address a binding request to the company operating the service, including when the machines are elsewhere. The third is reversibility: what a change of provider would cost, in time, in work and in disruption. It is the third that most often decides an organisation’s real fate, and it is the one examined least, because no clause settles it.

The chain of dependency

In the case of AI, the chain of dependency is longer than the visible interface: the model used, the infrastructure that runs it, the underlying compute hardware, and the data that served to specialise it. Two distinctions help in finding one’s bearings. The first separates what is contractual from what is architectural: a clause is a promise, an exportable format is a fact, and only the second stays true on the day the relationship sours. The second concerns what you keep on your own side: a library of instructions, a set of evaluation tests and an indexed corpus outlive the model that consumes them, and they are harder to rebuild than to keep. A model whose weights are published moves the question without dissolving it, since compute capacity and skills are still needed to run it.

The cost

Sovereignty has a cost, and denying it leads to bad decisions in both directions: paying dearly for an independence nobody needed, or accepting a dependency whose exit price nobody has measured. The useful formulation is therefore not “sovereign or not” but “which dependency would hurt if it broke, and what would the alternative cost”. The term being both political and commercial, it is claimed by very different offerings: the most reliable test consists in asking what can be exported, in what format, and what would start up again elsewhere without a rewrite. Finally, dependency is not only technical, because it also lodges in skills and in working habits, which are rebuilt more slowly than a contract is terminated.