As geopolitical tensions mount and AI re-shapes the digital landscape, governments worldwide face an urgent new reality: true national sovereignty now depends as much on controlling digital infrastructure as it does on physical borders, according toGlobalData.
The research group’s latest report – Digital Sovereignty – reveals that nations risk losing control over critical systems, sensitive data, and economic competitiveness unless they act decisively to build sovereign digital capabilities.
The stakes are being raised further by a looming energy crisis. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that global data centre electricity consumption will have grown from 269 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2020 to 1 193TWh by 2035 – a more than four-fold increase that today’s infrastructure is not built to absorb.
The new report also reveals how the 2018 US Cloud Act, which compels US cloud providers to hand over data to US authorities even when stored overseas, has triggered a global race to reduce dependency on US technology vendors. This urgency has been sharpened by the Trump administration’s volatile foreign policy and the rapid growth of AI, which now ingests ever-larger volumes of data for model training – including sensitive data. The average training set size of AI systems grew from 414-billion data points in 2022 to nearly 16 697-billion in 2025.
“Digital sovereignty is no longer a niche policy ambition,” says Isabel Al-Dhahir, principal analyst at GlobalData. “It has become a strategic imperative for every nation. The combination of extraterritorial data laws, AI’s insatiable appetite for data, and the growing geopolitical weaponisation of technology means that over-reliance on foreign digital infrastructure now carries the same risk profile as dependence on foreign energy supplies.”
One of the most pressing, yet underappreciated, threats to digital sovereignty is energy. Data centres are the physical backbone of cloud computing, AI training, and national digital infrastructure – and they already consume 6% of the total US electricity supply, according to the International Data Center Authority. If a nation cannot guarantee reliable, affordable domestic electricity, compute capacity will migrate to wherever power is abundant, transferring governing influence to foreign operators and jurisdictions.
The report identifies five critical technologies that underpin any credible digital sovereignty strategy: reliable energy infrastructure; fibre-optic networks; home-grown AI; a secure semiconductor supply chain; and post-quantum cryptography. While larger economies such as the US and China have the scale to pursue self-sufficiency across multiple domains, smaller nations must prioritise strategically – focusing on the most accessible and impactful segments of the technology stack.
“The energy and semiconductor dimensions of digital sovereignty are deeply interconnected,” says Al-Dhahir. “Nations that cannot secure affordable domestic power will find their AI ambitions stranded; those that cannot access leading-edge chips will remain permanently dependent on foreign goodwill. Saudi Arabia’s $100-billion investment in Humain and the UK’s £500-million ($660-million) Sovereign AI Unit demonstrate that economies are beginning to understand the cost of inaction.”
The report also issues a stark warning about the threat posed by quantum computing.
GlobalData anticipates that from 2030 onward, quantum computers could become a tangible operational threat capable of breaking widely used encryption protocols. Nations that fail to transition to post-quantum cryptography risk losing control over sensitive data and critical decision-making. This threat is compounded by the fact that adversaries are already harvesting encrypted databases today in anticipation of future quantum capabilities – a technique known as “harvest now, decrypt later”.
“Quantum computing is not a distant threat,” says Al-Dhahir. “It is already shaping how adversaries behave today. A nation that delays its post-quantum migration is not simply behind the technological curve, it is actively placing its classified communications, critical infrastructure, and citizen data at risk. Digital sovereignty, in the quantum era, means cryptographic migration is a national security priority, not merely a technical upgrade.”