In a recent Accenture survey of almost 2,000 business and government leaders, 61% said they were more likely to seek sovereign technology solutions with the rise of AI and geopolitical risks. But while sovereignty is often associated with efforts from Europe to protect the continent’s digital backbone, the survey’s results consisted of data from 28 countries, spanning the Middle East, Africa (EMEA), North America, and Asia.

“Sovereignty is not a European-only phenomenon,” said Surya Mukherjee, Accenture's head of technology research for Europe. The researcher pointed to Stanford AI Index research revealing “meteoric, exponential rise” in incidents of AI referenced in U.S. regulation and legislative documents.

Gartner, meanwhile, predicts 65% of countries in the world will build sovereignty regulations by 2028. Mukherjee, though, told SDxCentral that this is a conservative estimate, believing the same number has already built up sovereign protections in light of Europe’s lead on GDPR “rubbing off” on the rest of the world.

Accenture’s report labels telecom operators as frontliners in this brave new world, with locally recognized national champions that can meet public sector trust requirements and run government-endorsed industry or cross-industry solutions. This has led to operators taking the lead in digital sovereignty through their enterprise arms, with Deutsche Telekom’s business unit, T-Systems, becoming one of the first vendors to appoint a chief sovereignty officer. Shortly after, BT Business announced a platform promising sovereignty services for the U.K. private and public sectors, spanning connectivity, voice, cloud, and AI.

For Simon Ranyard, managing director for Northwest Europe at Orange Business, connectivity is the key differentiator when it comes to telecom’s business arms versus other system integrators (SIs).

“As a telecom company, that's our heritage. And connectivity is critical in this, because you need to basically move the data around in an efficient way … and giving visibility of where that data is going,” said Ranyard.

Bleu, red, and white

Orange arguably fired the starting pistol in the sovereignty space with Bleu, the platform it formed in 2024 with French SI Capgemini, which provides a Microsoft Azure-based sovereign cloud within France. Ranyard said that while the U.K. is still less focused on sovereign cloud than mainland Europe, he has been surprised as of late by growing British business awareness and interest when it comes to projects like Bleu.

This reflects a view from Simon Dumbleton, European CTO for World Wide Technology (WWT), a systems integrator with considerable experience building clouds for telecom. The CTO said the firm is seeing more interest from British and fellow European firms in heavy hyperscaler usage in sovereign solutions.

Steve Knibbs, director, Vodafone Business Security Enhanced (VBSE), went one step further, saying sovereignty is at the heart of procurement for the U.K. government, defense, critical infrastructure, financial services, and healthcare, as driven by strict regulations in the country.

“Performance matters, especially for things like industrial 5G, but it won’t be chosen over trust or transparency,” Knibbs said. “Customers demand operational control to remain within U.K. borders, and, when necessary, physical separation. In these highly sensitive domains, certificates of compliance alone do not suffice; clients require tangible evidence of sovereign control, encompassing governance, operational processes, and cryptographic custody, all anchored firmly within the U.K.”

In other words, even though the U.K. is no longer part of the EU, it has yet to become a Wild West of deregulation, especially as it introduces new regulations such as the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. This arguably gives extra market opportunities for telecom players like Vodafone to flex their trustworthy prowess over greenhorn AI incumbents.

The Orange-tinted view

Going back to geopolitical risk, Europe is also seeing a sovereign drive separate from its Brussels bureaucratic core. Speaking on geopolitics in the Nordics, Orange’s Ranyard said: "I would say they are quite nervous about their northern border, and the people that sit on the other side of that northern border."

This drive for sovereignty saw Finnish IT firm Tieto sign up to a sovereign cloud framework from Orange Business. As announced in February, the agreement centers around Cloud Avenue, Orange's sovereign cloud offering for the European market, with the agreement covering the entire Tieto group as it expands across the Nordics and Europe.

Tieto’s footprint can be found in Norwegian critical infrastructure, working as it does with Siemens to manage Nordic power grids through the Gridscale X platform. Its Tieto Banktech arm, meanwhile, provides cloud-based core banking and payment platforms for the region.

"International organizations operating all over the world can be very happy with being in a hyperscaler environment in terms of all the technological advancements that you get quickly, because obviously they develop new products and tools very quickly," Ranyard said. "But there are other companies, particularly ones that are part of the critical national infrastructure, who do not want to be in that environment and want to be in a more classical, private cloud environment where they know exactly where that data is, where they can tell the government where that data is, if at any point the government wanted to know."

Proving Accenture’s point somewhat, Orange is also seeing Europe’s lead rub off elsewhere in the world. Miguel Alvarez, chief data & AI officer at Orange Business, pointed to the example of Morocco, where Orange recently launched a sovereign AI platform by the name of Live Intelligence.

Alvarez said it was “supremely important” for the African nation to have its own digital strategy, as opposed to a “satellite” one. The exec also believes that sovereignty is driven partly by the company's fear of vendor lock-in, now amplified to a nation-state scale.

“It's important for them that we are a local player in Morocco, that we invest in our skills there, and that we can support our companies there,” said Alvarez, leaning in on the telecom tenet of trust. “So I think this is not just a European thing. For me, it goes beyond the threats or the risk that some people perceive due to the geopolitical situation, but also about making sure that you are not stuck in a situation where you don't have any good choices."

AI, Asia, anywhere

This pragmatism, often associated with cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), is also increasingly being applied to AI software. As a result, there has been a growing clamour for AI sovereignty, which Accenture’s Mukherjee defined as comprising the entire tech stack.

"Where does the AI decide, what data does it use, and what does it throw up? So those are two layers," Mukherjee said. "Then there's security on a granular, fine level, looking at the model itself: which country produced it, where was it produced. It's something that you need to think very deeply about as a country as well as a company."

Indonesia is one country thinking about this problem in depth. Tencent Cloud’s Europe GM Fred Sun told this title that the Chinese giant helps telco customers in the nation to build their own sovereign cloud. The main partnership has been on public and hybrid cloud ventures from Telkomsel, as well as building AI tools for B2B and B2C use cases, bolstering the mobile operator’s lead in national AI.

“We also have Indonesian customers who used to run their critical workload on hyperscaler data centers in other countries, and they're sort of repatriating that data back to their own country,” said Sun.

In a recent Forrester report, Tencent Cloud was distinguished as the only Chinese hyperscaler to maintain a "consistently deliberate" sovereign cloud strategy, catering to the specific regulatory demands of its primary markets.

For its part, Accenture has supported AI sovereignty efforts from telecom operators in Asia, such as another Indonesian player, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, which is building the country’s first sovereign AI cloud with both the consulting giant and Nvidia. The venture aims to support local startups and government clients while keeping national data onshore.

Beyond Asia, Accenture’s sovereign AI footprint can be found in the UAE with operator Du and Australia in partnership with Telstra. Similarly, Nvidia has joined a sovereign AI project for Latin America with Brazilian operator Claro to help develop national large language models (LLMs), while its technology powers a sovereign AI factory for Canadian telco Telus, as also established with Accenture assistance.

Chris Madan, product VP and head of Telus AI Factories, commented that telecom companies have been “trusted stewards of data and the critical infrastructure that society depends on for decades,” believing its sovereign offering to be a natural evolution of that responsibility.

The VP added that Canada's regulatory and geopolitical environment created both the strategic imperative and opportunity for Telus, noting that under the U.S. CLOUD Act, data stored on American cloud providers, even when physically in Canada, can be compelled by U.S. authorities. As such Canadian customers, he argued, need infrastructure that's genuinely under Canadian jurisdiction and control.

“True sovereignty, and the trust that comes with it, requires end-to-end control across every layer of the technology stack,” explained Madan. “The response has been exceptional. We’re seeing strong market demand and our Rimouski facility is close to reaching full capacity within months of opening.”

Explaining the global rise in sovereign AI ventures, Vodafone’s Knibbs noted that with most leading AI labs being international, the speed of innovation is making it harder for countries to keep control over their critical data and models.

“When sovereignty really matters, the preference is for AI solutions where both data and models stay fully within the U.K., sticking to U.K. standards for security and regulation,” said Knibbs, giving the British business perspective.

WWT’s Dumbleton echoed this view, noting that while it’s impossible for countries in Europe to have a 100% sovereign infrastructure, SIs can “build that infrastructure and put sovereign controls around it."

Capping off the deal is a sprinkle of that telco trust assurance. As Knibbs puts it, operators should see digital sovereignty “as much more than just local hosting - it’s about strong control and clear governance across all tech, including AI.”

“Boards are also extra alert now that generative AI is booming, worried that confidential data could cross borders during training or use, especially if global platforms are involved,” he said. “As AI gets used more for things like secure comms and threat detection, keeping both data and models sovereign is vital for trust.”

This article first appeared in the SDxCentral Sovereignty Supplement.

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