‘Sovereign AI’ is political branding. The reality is closer to digital colonialism

Fortune ^ | June 9, 2025 at 10:08 AM EDT | Nathan Benaich

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The United Arab Emirates is spending $20 billion on OpenAI’s Stargate UAE. The project is billed as a sovereign AI capability, yet it relies entirely on American chips, software, and infrastructure. This is the sovereign AI paradox: The harder nations push for AI independence, the deeper their dependencies become.

The UAE is not alone. From Paris to New Delhi, governments are pouring billions into so-called “sovereign” frontier models. France backs Mistral. India promotes BharatGPT. Each promises strategic autonomy yet is dependent on a globalized stack.

The term “AI factories,” adopted by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, rebrands data centers as strategic infrastructure akin to power plants or shipyards. This is political branding, not technical reality. It aligns AI with the rhetoric of national self-reliance, even as the underlying systems remain foreign-made and globally entangled. Calling any national data center an “AI factory” does not make it sovereign any more than France’s Qwant became a European search engine by wrapping Microsoft Bing.

Model weights, once seen as crown jewels, now update faster than policy cycles. They are versioned, cloned, and surpassed in quarterly releases. What endures is the infrastructure: chips, data pipelines, and labor required to build, deploy, and serve models. Sovereignty at the top of the stack is symbolic if the foundations remain foreign.

France’s Mistral was hailed as a European sovereignty breakthrough, only to be surpassed by more efficient, open-sourced Chinese models like DeepSeek. Now France and the UAE are co-funding what is billed as Europe’s largest AI campus, again built on...