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Gartner forecasts that by 2027 more than a third of enterprises will be using localised AI platforms up from just 5 % today. The shift is being driven by regulatory pressure geopolitical uncertainty and growing concern over Europe’ s dependence on foreign technology providers which currently supply over 80 % of the EU’ s digital infrastructure.

Political momentum is building alongside enterprise demand. Earlier this month the European Parliament called on the European Commission to explore ways to reduce reliance on non-EU vendors accelerating efforts to strengthen domestic AI ecosystems.

Rather than prioritising scale alone organisations are increasingly seeking AI platforms that reflect regional laws cultural expectations and data protection standards. According to Gartner trust and regulatory alignment now outweigh access to massive training datasets.

Stuart Harvey, CEO, Datactics, said:“ Sovereign AI isn’ t just about where data lives it puts a spotlight on data quality and data readiness. Regional platforms can deliver more relevant locally aligned models but only if organisations have clean well-governed and accessible data to begin with.” ultimately determines AI performance security and business value. In this new landscape compliance alone isn’ t enough organisations that invest early in data maturity will be the ones able to scale AI effectively and turn sovereignty into a competitive advantage.”

Gartner estimates countries pursuing independent AI stacks will need to invest at least 1 % of GDP into infrastructure by 2029 primarily for data centres and AI production facilities. The move is also expected to increase duplication of effort and reduce international collaboration.

Sachin Agrawal, Managing Director, Zoho UK, said:“ Increased demand for sovereign platforms will help drive investment into local data centres and infrastructure while also encouraging greater vendor diversification. This shift enables organisations to avoid over-reliance on a small number of hyperscalers improving resilience and choice across the ecosystem while also gives enterprises the confidence to adopt AI at scale knowing their data remains under UK jurisdiction.”

“ With the right policy frameworks and collaboration between government and businesses this momentum could strengthen the UK’ s position as a competitive AI hub while reducing dependence on overseas providers supporting both economies growth and digital sovereignty.”

Jennifer Holmes, CEO, London Internet Exchange, said:“ A growing move towards region-specific AI platforms reflects how seriously European organisations are taking issues such as data sovereignty regulatory compliance and latency. However, this shift also highlights a less visible challenge: AI doesn’ t operate in isolation and its success depends on the strength of the underlying digital infrastructure.”

“ As AI workloads scale and become more geographically distributed organisations will need reliable low-latency connectivity to move data efficiently between users clouds and compute resources. Without this the costs and performance constraints associated with running AI locally could quickly outweigh the benefits.”

“ To make region-specific AI viable in the long-term investment must extend beyond models and platforms to the networks that support them. Ensuring resilient highperformance connectivity will be essential to delivering AI services that are not only compliant and sovereign but also scalable cost-effective and dependable.” •

“ As enterprises move toward regionspecific AI stacks, they’ ll need to prioritise data readiness through standardising formats breaking down silos and embedding governance across the data lifecycle. High-quality trusted data is what

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