There's a new concept that's catching on fast in Europe! "Sovereign AI."
This concept, which has emerged in the last year or so, refers to the idea of building AI technologies - everything from machine learning algorithms to advanced large language model-based generative AI tools - locally in the countries and regions they're being served up to consumers and businssess users.
Several tech companies - from NVIDIA to Amazon Web Services (AWS) - are increasingly prioritising the building of all-important computing infrastructure in Europe to localize the storing and processing of data behind today's AI systems.
The concept is an evolution of the term "data sovereignty," which refers to the idea that people’s data should be stored on infrastructure within the country or continent they reside in, according to Filippo Sanesi, marketing and operations lead at France's OVHcloud.
"We see more and more companies understanding the importance of having your data locally and under a specific jurisdiction and governance,” Sanesi told CNBC. “We have a lot of data. This data is sovereign in specific countries, under specific regulations.”
Chris Gow, Cisco's Brussels-based EU public policy lead, told me that that sovereign AI is being driven “more driven by the industry naming it that, than it is from the policymakers’ side" - although that could eventually change. Countries are starting to push this idea of AI sovereignty because they recognize AI is “the future” and a “massively strategic technology,” Gow said.
David Hogan, EMEA vice president of enterprise sales at NVIDIA, says sovereign AI is about “reflecting the values of an organization or, equally, the country that you’re in and the values and the language." He added, "The core challenge is that most of the frontier models today have been trained primarily on Western data generally."
At Web Summit, many of the conversations I've had with CEOs, founders and investors have touched on a big problem in Europe: the fact that many of the critical technologies we depend on every day - search, mobile, cloud - are developed and managed by US-based tech giants like Google, Apple and Microsoft.
It's unsurprising, then, to see that sovereignty debate now extending to artificial intelligence - which many governments see as a massively strategic technology - too.
You can read and learn more about the "AI sovereignty" concept here in my latest piece for CNBC! https://lnkd.in/eVpRDegn #ai #aisovereignty #sovereignai #artificialintelligence #tech #technology #eutech #europetech
