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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.”