‘Sovereign AI’ is political branding—the reality is closer to digital colonialism

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 American infrastructure. These efforts highlight the depth of technological entanglement: Even in pursuit of sovereignty, nations remain dependent across the stack, from chips to data to middleware.

The deepest dependencies lie in the invisible layers. Training data is often annotated by outsourced labor abroad, while pipelines for filtering and tuning rely on proprietary U.S. tools that entrench vendor lock-in. As AI moves into complex fields like law and medicine, demand is shifting toward expert labor in developed markets. Yet owning weights while depending on fragmented global workforces and imported toolchains is hardly sovereignty—it is a repackaged dependency.

This reveals a new kind of digital colonialism. Not one where countries are denied access, but one where they are structurally bound into dependencies across every layer of the AI stack. A European lab may host its own weights on a data center in France, but that center runs on American hardware, software, and middleware. The illusion of control masks a dense web of interdependence.

Strategic leverage today lies not in model authorship, but in owning the connective infrastructure that links data to deployment. That means investing in domestic expert data capacity, security, building open-source engineering stacks, and cultivating chip independence—not to beat Nvidia, but to secure “good enough” alternatives and diversify risk. Countries that fail to grasp this are sleepwalking into vendor lock-in enforced not by licenses, but by geopolitical gravity.

Nations must think in ecosystems, not hero models. A vibrant AI sector will not emerge from a flagship GPT-X, but from an interdependent network of local tools, standards, infrastructure, and governance. The U.S. and China have ecosystems. Europe, as yet, does not.

Sovereign AI reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of modern technology. Unlike oil or steel, AI depends on global flows of data, chips, software, and talent. No country can meaningfully isolate itself. Sovereignty, pursued at the top of the stack, risks becoming a costly illusion.

The choice is clear: Pursue symbolic ownership or invest in strategic infrastructure. The harder nations chase the illusion of AI independence, the deeper their entrenchment in foreign dependencies becomes. At present, most are choosing the former—and will pay for it dearly.