SocietyAI glossary
Digital sovereignty
A country's or organisation's ability to retain control over its critical technologies and data: where they are stored, who builds the tools, which law applies. With AI, the stakes are becoming central for Europe, which is highly dependent on American clouds and foreign chips.
In other words
Growing your own vegetable patch rather than relying entirely on the neighbouring supermarket for food.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- A company moves to Germany to reassure its clients
An AI platform is moving its US parent company to Germany to address its customers' concerns about the Cloud Act. We analyse what this move reveals.
- The Pentagon is considering lending five billion to a computing startup
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is reportedly discussing a loan of around $5 billion to a young computing company to shore up the American data centre supply chain. We analyse this shift in role.
- Do you have to be the best to count?
Faced with American and Chinese investments on an entirely different scale, we examine what it means to count in a competition one cannot win, and what sovereignty truly demands.
- Mistral raises €3 billion, the largest European tech funding round
Mistral has announced a €3 billion funding round valuing the company at over €21 billion, billed as the largest ever raised by a European tech firm. We look at what this changes and what it doesn't.
- The sovereignty of computing: the real issue no one names
Cambricon posts spectacular growth despite US restrictions, NAVER builds sovereign capacity in South Korea. We analyse what the idea of compute sovereignty really covers, and what it implies for Europe.
- What is an "open source" AI? The concept that reshuffles the cards of technological power
Open model, open weights, MIT licence, closed model: these technical distinctions actually decide who controls AI and who can have it cut off. We explain simply what an open-source AI is, what it changes in practice, and why it has become a major sovereignty issue.