Sovereign AI

I've been thinking a lot about "sovereign AI" — the idea that countries should control their own AI.

AI is not a product. It's a stack with six layers.

The chips. The physical hardware AI runs on. NVIDIA, ASML, TSMC

The compute. Warehouses full of chips, drawing enormous power.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta

The cloud. Someone else's computer, rented by the hour. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure

The model. The thing people mean when they say "AI." OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek

Then the data. What the model learned from — and what you feed it.
And the application. The thing you actually touch.

Notice something about all of those main companies in the first four layers?
They are primarily US companies.