Digital sovereignty has moved from policy slogan to operational agenda. At this year’s UN Open Source Week, a coalition of nations, technologists, and institutions laid out concrete roadmaps for replacing dependence on US cloud giants with open-source alternatives — and the conversation was notably more urgent than in years past.
Tanzania: from consumers to creators.
Tanzania’s Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Angellah Jasmine Kairuki, delivered the most compelling case study. “Who actually truly owns the ecosystems that serve our people?” she asked. “From passive consumers of technology to active creators of technology — this is what digital sovereignty means in practice. Not isolation, but ownership; not dependence, but partnership on our terms.”
The numbers back her up. More than 90 percent of Tanzania’s government systems now run on open-source technologies. The country has trained approximately 500 public officials as a “collaborative community of digital developers — citizens building for citizens.” A legal framework including the 2020 e-Government Authority Act and the 2023 Personal Data Protection Act underpins the transition. Money previously spent on proprietary licences has been reallocated to people and infrastructure.
AI sovereignty: seven practical questions.
Sergio Gago, a German executive serving as CTO of Cloudera, framed AI sovereignty as inseparable from data and infrastructure sovereignty. “Interoperability is a condition for participation; sovereignty is a condition for continuity,” he said.
Gago laid out seven practical questions for any nation evaluating AI sovereignty: 1) Where does your data really reside? 2) Who can access it, and under what conditions? 3) Can you replace the models instantly and have the systems continue working? 4) Can you continue operating if a provider changes its commercial or political position?
The real-world relevance of that final question was underscored by the Trump administration’s recent halt to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 deployments. For nations relying on US AI platforms, the message was stark: if Washington decides your access is a problem, your infrastructure can be switched off without warning.
Open formats, open engines, and open orchestration are all necessary — not just releasing model weights on proprietary clouds. True open-source AI, Gago argued, must span data formats, catalogues, compute engines, governance, and safety tooling.
Europe: sovereignty as choice and resilience.
Louise McKeever, Ireland’s Government CIO, defined digital sovereignty as “the ability of a government to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies” — calling it a national security concern. She tied the objective to Ireland’s Better Public Services 2030 plan.
Dr Sachiko Muto of OpenForum Europe pushed back against zero-sum framing: digital sovereignty is “not being defined as a zero-sum game” but about “bringing user control into the discussion” and reducing single-vendor dependence.
The institutional plumbing: OSPOs and sovereign tech agencies.
A recurring theme was the role of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), described by Nvidia’s Arun Gupta as “the intersection of policy and open source” — the instrument that turns the desire for sovereignty into operational reality.
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (ZenDiS) offered the most advanced model. Director Adriana Groh argued that governments cannot treat open-source volunteers as “involuntary suppliers” of critical components. Foundational open source must be treated as public infrastructure — like roads and bridges — that the public sector has a duty to maintain.
What comes next.
The UN Open Source Week made clear that digital sovereignty is no longer a fringe concern. With Nvidia, the largest AI hardware supplier, signalling support for “local sovereign cloud partners” running its stack in-country, even the hyperscalers are positioning themselves for a multipolar digital world. The question is no longer whether nations will build independent digital infrastructure — but how quickly, and on whose terms.