For years, cloud sovereignty was shorthand for data residency. Keep it local, keep it compliant, so the thinking went, and you’ll keep regulators happy. But as AI rewires what organisations actually need from their infrastructure, sovereignty is now more than simply where a server sits. Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer, Red Hat, describes sovereignty, AI and virtualisation as three interwoven threads. Organisations building sovereign environments at present are managing legacy virtual machines that they can’t decommission, and container-based, AI-native workloads are seeing increased usage in leading edge companies. The expectation is that a single platform will now carry both. “No one is setting up a sovereign environment today without thinking about AI,” says Badani. “Customers who are setting up sovereign environments want to make sure they’re supporting both containers and machines, because you have some legacy VMs and these new cloud-native workloads.”Digital sovereignty isn't a project you finish and tick off. It's a continuous journey where you keep re-evaluating your risks, your cloud estate and your partners as technology and regulations evolve.Jon Tullett, IDC A platform that can only address one side creates its own problems. What Badani calls a virtualisation cost crisis – or overspending on proprietary, legacy virtualisation – doesn’t just slow modernisation, it limits what organisations can put toward building AI-capable, sovereign infrastructure. And no organisation wants to be left behind on AI, with many boards asking questions about whether they’re spending enough to stay competitive. Refusing to fund AI is becoming untenable, which means the discussion about legacy spend and sovereign platform investment now has the attention of the CEO and board rather than staying in IT. There is also the old problem of lock-in to be considered, which is now as much a geopolitical problem as a technical one. Jon Tullett, IDC “Given all the geopolitical pressures, every country wants to have some control over their future action,” says Badani. “I don’t know if you can extricate yourself completely, but every country wants some mobility.” Being locked into a single proprietary stack doesn’t just constrain technical options. In Badani’s view, it constrains policy, economic and innovation options at a national level, which is why sovereignty has moved from a compliance consideration to a strategic priority. The discussion about sovereignty used to take place in your legal department, says Badani. “Now it’s also happening in your architecture review.” Regulators in financial services, healthcare and government are now all looking more closely at AI, and this has forced a more precise definition of what sovereignty actually means, he says.This conversation about sovereignty used to happen in your legal