The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has rebatted the cards of digital power. Today, its deployment is based on an invisible infrastructure: the cloud.
As long as it remains in the hands of the GAFAM, any ambition of sovereignty will remain a vow.
AI does not consume the cloud: it transforms it
Long considered a technical convenience, the cloud has become, with AI, a direct extension of human brains and economic systems. Artificial intelligence is not content to be software executed in the “cloud”; It is built, trained and executed through it. Where the previous generations of digital tools were content to occasionally access hosted databases, the current models require massive scalability, a sustained calculation capacity, a fluid data orchestration but, above all, a secure and controllable execution environment.
With new IA uses, the requirements of confidentiality, transparency, traceability reach an unprecedented level. Private inference, for example, obliges to execute models on data without ever exposing it, neither to the service provider, nor to the model itself. This supposes advanced cryptographic mechanisms, protected execution environments, clear governance on access to data. It is a technical upheaval but, above all, a political rupture: the cloud is no longer a simple place, it must become a space of trust.
Locked dependence that bridles European innovation
In this context, the current situation is worrying. Europe is structurally dependent on American hyperscalters who are not under its laws or its strategic interests. It is not a defensive posture but a lucid observation. While the American giants were locking the market with very aggressive pricing offers, which are difficult to reversible and an almost total software integration, Europe, it was slow to build its own sovereign alternatives on a scale.
Today, this inertia has a price: most models of AI trained in Europe are on non-European infrastructure, even though they exist and are just as efficient. The most sensitive health, defense and industry data transit in environments on which we have no taking. This dependence weighs on the competitiveness of our businesses, on legal compliance and strategic control of intangible assets.
Worse still: migrate your AI models from one cloud to another requires an often deterrent effort. American platforms have been designed to capture data and keep it. In a context where AI becomes a strategic asset for each sector, this capture weakens the European data ecosystem, and bridles the logics of open innovation.
Towards progressive sovereignty, anchored in the uses
The good news is that this dependence is not irreversible. Provided to accept a simple reality: we do not need a technological big bang, but a progressive tilting. The transition to a sovereign cloud should not be based on an absolute injunction to migrate all its existing. It can and must start with new use cases, project project, which can thus be natively designed in a trusted environment.
These first rocking, if they are thought of with the right safety, compliance and transparency standards, may be generalized, replicated and extended. We thus build, by capillarity, a technical and cultural base conducive to sovereignty. And we limit the risks, avoiding the tunnel effect of “migrate everything or do nothing”.
However, this supposes a change of state of mind. As long as sovereignty is seen as a constraint, it will remain marginal. It must become a differentiation lever, a guarantee for customers, proof of their responsibility and their commitment. This requires companies to enhance their level of requirement, to consider their infrastructure to be a strategic choice, more only as a cost line. It is a bet on technological independence, on regulatory compliance and long -term robustness. And, it is also a political act: that of refusing that the artificial intelligence which will structure our economies, our public services and our difference, is controlled at a distance.
