Digital sovereignty starts from the physical layer
Digital sovereignty is not limited to data or software. It also starts with control of the physical infrastructure, its location, its applicable law and its legal dependencies.
Why sovereignty starts beneath the racks
When we talk about digital sovereignty, we often think of data, cloud or encryption. But for AI infrastructure, the question arises earlier: who actually controls the physical layer? If space, energy and cooling depend on an actor subject to a foreign jurisdiction, sovereignty remains partial.
The issue is therefore as much legal as industrial. An AI Factory operated under French law, with French and European capital, offers a more legible basis for CIOs, lawyers and compliance officers. It reduces grey areas linked to extraterritoriality and facilitates alignment with requirements of frameworks such as GDPR, NIS2 and SecNumCloud.
The point is not to brandish sovereignty as an abstract rallying cry. The challenge is to make infrastructure predictable, controllable and compatible with the requirements of sensitive sectors. A sovereign physical layer does not eliminate all risk, but it eliminates a structural vulnerability: dependence on a foreign jurisdiction over the very tool that carries the computations.
The right reflex is therefore not to ask only where the data is, but also where the foundations that enable it to function are.
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