The Two-Prong Strategy for Sovereign AI

If you are a nation-state in 2026, you are facing an existential crisis. Do you mortgage your future to foreign hyperscalers, becoming a “digital colony” dependent on APIs you don’t control? Or do you try to build your own clouds, burning billions on hardware that is obsolete by the time it arrives, and risk going bankrupt?

The answer is neither. The answer is the Two-Prong Strategy.

Prong 1: Procure and Develop Basic Infrastructure (The Commodity Layer)

Treat raw compute and energy like oil, water, or steel. You need it to survive, but you don’t necessarily need to invent the drilling rig or the blast furnace.

Countries should use adaptable, aggressive policies—look at India’s 20-year tax holidays for global hyperscalers—to lure the physical infrastructure to their shores.

• Let them build the data centers. Let them pour the concrete.
• Let them bring the GPUs. Let them handle the supply chain headaches.
• Let them solve the cooling problems.

Your job as the state is to provide the land, the power, and the policy stability. Secure the “commodity” layer. Ensure there is enough compute on your soil to run your economy, even if you didn’t manufacture the chips yourself.

Prong 2: Own the Orchestration Layer (The Sovereign Layer)

This is where the real game is played. While you rent the compute, you must own the brain.

You cannot rely on a foreign API to run your government services, your healthcare, or your defense. You need a sovereign “Orchestration Layer.”

• Build on Open Source: Don’t build a model from scratch (unless you have $100B). Build on top of Llama, Mistral, and their 2026 descendants.
• Fine-Tune Locally: Train these models on your data, in your language, aligned with your cultural values. A model for India should understand the Indian Constitution, not just US Case Law.
• Own the Glue: Build the “agentic glue” that connects these models to your national databases. The logic of how a citizen applies for a passport should be code that you own.

Integration is the New Innovation

The danger isn’t that you won’t have access to intelligence. The danger is that the intelligence you access won’t know who you are.

By splitting your strategy—commoditizing the hardware while fiercely protecting the software orchestration—you get the best of both worlds. You get the massive scale of the global giants, but the granular control of a sovereign state.

Don’t buy the cow. But definitely own the recipe for the cheese.