THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS, July 15, 2026
SIPRONE today published its position that Europe cannot achieve AI sovereignty through regulation, data residency and European cloud regions alone. According to the company, legal ownership and jurisdictional control of the underlying infrastructure should form part of Europe’s AI governance debate.
Europe has developed an advanced regulatory framework for artificial intelligence, including the EU AI Act. SIPRONE argues that regulatory leadership does not automatically provide infrastructure sovereignty and that European data residency is not the same as European legal ownership or operational control.
AI systems increasingly process sensitive information across government, healthcare, financial services, industrial operations and critical infrastructure. As these systems become more deeply integrated into essential services and decision-making processes, SIPRONE believes that infrastructure ownership should be treated as a governance issue rather than solely as a technical procurement matter.
The company identifies several areas that boards and public institutions should assess when evaluating AI infrastructure. These include legal ownership, applicable jurisdiction, privileged access, control of encryption, operational continuity and dependency on external providers.
“Regulation defines the obligations that organisations must meet, while infrastructure ownership determines where ultimate authority resides,” said Shafir Barsatie, CEO and Founder of SIPRONE.
“When organisations use critical AI infrastructure that they do not legally own, aspects of jurisdiction, operational control and provider dependency may remain outside their direct authority. Infrastructure ownership should therefore be considered alongside regulation, cybersecurity and data protection when assessing AI sovereignty.”
SIPRONE’s position distinguishes between data location and infrastructure control. According to the company, an AI workload may be hosted within Europe while the underlying infrastructure remains owned or governed by another organisation.
The company advocates a federated approach in which individual organisations or jurisdictions own and govern their infrastructure locally while retaining the ability to interoperate with other independently controlled environments.
SIPRONE considers AI sovereignty a board-level governance and infrastructure issue because decisions concerning ownership, jurisdiction and operational authority can affect regulatory accountability, continuity and long-term institutional control.
About SIPRONE
SIPRONE is a Netherlands-based company focused on sovereign digital infrastructure. Its work examines how legal ownership, jurisdictional control and federated infrastructure models can support digital and AI sovereignty.
