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Who Owns Your AI? The Sovereignty Question Enterprises Can No Longer Ignore

Enterprises that rushed to adopt third-party AI tools are now reconsidering the trade-off between capability and control, as concerns grow about losing proprietary data and competitive advantage to external providers. This has sparked a broad movement toward **AI and data sovereignty** — building independent control over models and data infrastructure rather than relying on centralised cloud providers. A survey of over 2,050 senior executives by EDB found that 70% believe a sovereign data and AI platform is essential to their success.

When generative AI first escaped the lab and landed in corporate workflows, most businesses made a quiet, uncomfortable trade. Hand over your proprietary data to third-party model providers, get impressive results back, and worry about the governance implications later. Later, it turns out, is now.

The original bargain was always lopsided. Your data flows through infrastructure you don't own, under terms you didn't write, with protections that can evaporate the moment a provider decides to update their policies. For a while, the capability gains were good enough that most companies looked the other way.

That's changing. With agentic AI systems moving from novelty to genuine business infrastructure, executives are revisiting exactly what they gave away.

Kevin Dallas, CEO of EDB, frames it bluntly: "Data is really a new currency; it's the IP for many companies. The big concern is, if you're deploying an AI-infused application with a cloud-based large language model, are you losing your IP? Are you losing your competitive position?"

According to internal EDB research, 70% of global executives now believe they need a sovereign data and AI platform to remain competitive. That's a striking number, even accounting for the fact that EDB has a commercial interest in that conclusion.

The sovereignty conversation has also gone geopolitical. At Davos earlier this year, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang made the case that every country should be building its own AI infrastructure rather than renting capability from a handful of American hyperscalers. "Take advantage of your fundamental natural resource, which is your language and culture," he argued. "Have your national intelligence be part of your ecosystem." Whether that vision is realistic or just good salesmanship for NVIDIA hardware is a separate debate, but the sentiment is landing in boardrooms as well as government ministries.

EDB has published a report on all this, based on a survey of over 2,050 senior executives and a series of industry interviews. The central thesis is that the push for AI and data sovereignty, meaning genuine organisational control over models, data pipelines, and governance, is already well underway at the enterprise level, not just something being discussed in policy papers.

The cynical read is that this is a vendor whitepaper dressed up as research. The less cynical read is that the underlying concern is legitimate regardless of who's publishing it. Companies that built critical processes on top of third-party AI systems are only now confronting how little visibility or control they actually have. That realisation tends to concentrate minds.

The full report is available to download via EDB.