Sovereign AI in 2025

Abstract At the London Tech Week event in early June, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised the UK as the ‘envy of the world’ when it comes to AI researchers, but he also criticised it as the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure. The criticism is somewhat self-serving: when the UK does get around to building out that infrastructure, it’s certain to consist largely of chips sold by Huang’s company. It’s also unsurprising: Huang has been pitching the idea of ‘sovereign AI’ since at least 2023 , conscious that nation states are the next deep pockets to target after the hyperscalers and generously funded model builders. In a world where the only real contenders in the race for AI supremacy are the US and China, we look at how the pursuit of AI sovereignty is playing out across the rest of the planet.