Show Notes
Throughout history, statecraft was defined by borders, battlelines, and territory. In the 20th century, global power shifted to financial capital and energy reserves. Today, with the digital revolution well underway, does real authority now belong to those who control our data and code?
And what does sovereignty now mean in a fast changing AI landscape? Back in the day it used to mean keeping data in a local server room. But today, frontier AI models are advancing at pace, some argue at a speed we can’t control and regulatory lines are being redrawn across the world to try and keep up. Governments and boardrooms now face a fundamental question: who’s controlling who? And what can we do about it?
Joining host Tom Parker is Charlie Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO of Everpure, Sana Khareghani, Chief Strategy Officer at Era4, Professor of Practice in AI at King’s College London, AI Policy Lead for Responsible AI UK and Former Head of UK Government Office for Artificial Intelligence and Clare Schramm Fergus, Managing Director, Transaction Banking Technology Platforms, Lloyds Banking Group and Board Member of OpenUK.
Sources: FT Resources, Wired, TAIDE, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, UK GOV Sovereign AI Fund, Politico
This content is paid for by Everpure and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Next Five
Imagine it’s 2006, not 2026. You’re an automobile factory manager, looking at combustion engine vehicles moving through the assembly line. A sight that has been seen since the Model T Ford, a century earlier. Today, you’re still watching legacy internal combustion engines roll off one side but high-voltage battery packs drop into electric chassis on the other. Electric vehicles could account for just over a quarter of global new car sales this year and as much as half of light vehicles sold worldwide by 2035. 5 years ago, it was just 9%. Across the industry, the ground is shifting under automakers' feet. Yet the rumbling is being felt much more in some countries than others. The map of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine), EV and autonomous dominance is being rewritten.
Supply and demand. The foundational backbone of market economies. And we’re in the AI era, where demand and supply is being rewritten. Behind this AI revolution, sits a monumental physical buildout and energy demand. Globally, data centre power consumption will double by 2030 toward 945 terawatt-hours, consuming more power than the entire nation of Japan. In some regions the strain is already visible: data centres accounted for more than a fifth of Ireland's national electricity consumption in 2022 and predicted to reach nearly a third this year. Stateside, in 2023, when less powerful models existed, roughly a quarter of electricity use in the US state of Virginia was sucked up by data centres. And yet, McKinsey estimates that there will still be $7tn in global data-centre infrastructure investment by 2030. Then come the Hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle who are expected to spend around $670bn on AI-related capital expenditure this year alone, and nearly $800bn next year. The nine largest AI companies have collectively forecast $4.1tn in capital expenditure through to 2030, a trillion dollars more than the total 2025 Capex of all US non-financial companies combined. So looking at systems being rewritten, are we witnessing the greatest industrial re-tooling in human history, or is it all too much to handle?
It’s Q3 2026, the systems that form the global economy are currently being rewritten by the digitally led, fourth industrial revolution and the geopolitical repositioning of power. You’re an investment banker, a portfolio manager or a retail investor looking at trading screens flash red and green. There’s a hive of activity. But what to make of it.The indicators continue to flash, but the signals are conflicting.
Sovereignty, by definition, is being updated. Sovereignty 2.0. Under geopolitical tensions, supply chain dependencies and competing regional regulations, the discussion around digital sovereignty is shaping where you're allowed to build, what models you’re allowed to train on, and who's allowed to see the results.
We’re at the start of Q3 2026. Every day that passes, individuals, managers, executives and boards are crunching their internal numbers. They’re working out if the millions of dollars spent on cutting edge agentic AI deployment over the previous 2 years is showing signs of meaningful ROI. If figures from the first half of 2025 were anything to go on, the juice was not worth the squeeze. MIT’s Gen AI Divide Report 2025 showed that ninety-five percent of generative AI projects in H1 last year failed to deliver demonstrable ROI. Ninety-five percent. But, what happened to that remaining five percent? What secret engine were those elite organisations running that the rest of the market is completely missed? Is it really a gap in technical horsepower? Did they structure innovation better? Manage risk more competently? Or did they grant their teams the power to experiment more freely than the rest?