Is AI sovereignty really an illusion?
Caught between the United States and China, many countries are now pursuing “AI sovereignty”: the ability not to depend on foreign powers for a technology destined to permeate the entire economy. But building domestically everything AI requires – from semiconductors to data centers, from cloud infrastructure to the most advanced models – is prohibitively expensive and probably impossible. The point, however, is that sovereignty is not the same as technological autarky. Not every application requires frontier models and chips, and technologies that are today available only to a few will ...