Digital sovereignty at the UN: Inside the global push to replace US cloud giants with open-source tech

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET's key takeawaysCountries around the world want to free themselves from American tech companies.Open source is the key to gaining digital sovereignty.The United States opposes digital sovereignty, but no one outside America agrees. NEW YORK – At the United Nations Open Source Week, digital sovereignty moved from policy slogan to operational agenda. Ministers and technologists from Germany to Ireland to Morocco to Tanzania and many more besides laid out how open source, interoperability, and open AI are becoming conditions for national control over critical digital systems.The new digital bottom line is that digital sovereignty is no longer about building isolated national tech stacks but about owning data and infrastructure and the ability to switch vendors and models without breaking essential services. They also agreed that the only way to get there is through open standards and open source.Also: 98% of IT leaders want digital sovereignty: SUSE is operationalizing it for companies everywhereDigital sovereignty is not just a European movement. Numerous Global South countries have also had enough of putting all their IT eggs into a Microsoft, Google, or Amazon Web Services basket. Tanzania: 'From passive consumers to active creators'Tanzania supplied the week's clearest definition of digital sovereignty in practice. Angellah Jasmine Kairuki, Tanzania's Minister for Legal and Constitutional Affairs, opened her speech with a blunt question: "Who actually truly owns the ecosystems that serve our people?" For too many nations, she said, the answer had been "a license that we did not write, a platform that we could not inspect, a dependency that we could not break."She framed Tanzania's shift to open source as a move "from passive consumers of technology to… active creators of technology," and argued that "this is what digital sovereignty means in practice – not isolation, but ownership; not dependence, but partnership on our terms."Also: How digitally sovereign is your organization? This Red Hat tool can tell you in minutesKairuki backed the rhetoric with numbers: more than 90% of Tanzania's government systems now run on open-source technologies, under a legal framework that includes the 2020 e‑Government Authority Act, a Personal Data Protection Act (2023), cybercrime law, and sectoral regulations, all built around shared national infrastructure and open interfaces.The country has also reallocated money from proprietary licenses to people. According to Kairuki, Tanzania has trained around 500 public officials as "a collaborative community of digital developers – citizens building for citizens" who run and evolve the systems they create.Her message to other governments in the Global South was pointed: with the right rules, leadership, and workforce, "building independent digital infrastructure is not the privilege of a wealthy few, but… within reach of every nation that is willing to choose it."AI sovereigntyOn the AI front, Sergio Gago, the German CTO of Cloudera, speaking in a session on AI sovereignty and interoperability, warned that when data, infrastructure and governance are fully concentrated in a handful of providers, any AI layer on top will "reproduce all those biases only faster, at a greater scale," and argued that "we often speak as though AI begins with a model… but it does not. It begins with data and infrastructure, and, besides that, institutions and people."Gago's core claim was that "interoperability is a condition for participation" and "sovereignty is a condition for continuity." He spelled out what AI sovereignty and "private AI" should mean for institutions: being able to answer seven practical questions, from "Where does your data really reside?" and "Who can access it, and under what conditions?" to "Can we replace the models instantly and the systems continue working?" and "Can we continue operating if a provider changes its commercial or political position?"Clearly, the answer, as Trump's administration's recent stoppage of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in their deployment tracks, showed is "No." If your AI workflow can be shut down by a government's whim, you really can't rely on it. Also: How AI has suddenly become much more useful to open-source developersIn his view, real sovereignty "does not mean isolation or technological nationalism." Instead, it is "the ability to participate in a global ecosystem without surrendering to other people's terms of service," and that depends on open formats, open engines, and open orchestration, not just releasing model weights on top of proprietary clouds and data stacks.Gago called for "true open source AI" that spans data formats, catalogs, compute engines, governance, and safety tooling, so that public and private institutions can "bring AI to the data" across on‑prem, sovereign cloud, and public cloud, rather than shipping sensitive data into opaque external systems.Europe and Ireland: Sovereignty as choice and resilienceEuropean officials and practitioners used the week to refine a less zero‑sum framing of sovereignty, positioning it as "choice and resilience" inside a deeply interconnected ecosystem.Ireland's new Government CIO, Louise McKeever, offered a concise government‑side definition: for her, digital sovereignty is "the ability of a government to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technologies" in a world of cross‑border data flows, AI, and geopolitical risk – and that makes it "a national security concern" as much as a tech one.Also: France is ditching Windows for digital sovereignty - and its new Linux stack is taking shapeMcKeever argued that sovereignty is "about choice and resilience," not "owning every technology," and tied it directly to Ireland's Better Public Services 2030 plan, which aims for essentially all public services to be available and heavily consumed online.Open source, in that strategy, is how Ireland increases control, resilience, security, and in‑house capability: from an "open source first" stack in the agriculture ministry, to shared digital building blocks like a government digital wallet, designed around privacy, user control, and reuse across agencies.On the policy side, European voices such as OpenForum Europe's Dr. Sachiko Muto stressed that digital sovereignty "is not being defined as a zero-sum game," but about "bringing user control into the discussion" and reducing single‑country or single‑vendor dependence for critical infrastructure.OSPOs and 'sovereign tech agencies': From slogans to infrastructureIf Tanzania's speech put digital sovereignty in moral and political terms, the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for Good track spent much of its time on institutional plumbing: how to build the machinery that makes sovereignty stick. Across that panel, OSPOs were described as the "intersection of policy and open source," and, in Nvidia's Director of Open Source Ecosystem and Developer Platform Arun Gupta's words, "the instrument" that lets institutions move from wanting digital sovereignty to actually achieving it.Also: Why AI tokens will send your enterprise cloud bill sky-high againFor example, OSPOs can align open-source choices with an organization's mission and future architecture, rather than relying on ad‑hoc adoption. They can also provide legal and procedural cover for civil servants who want to contribute code, join upstream projects, or collaborate with the private sector but face regulatory uncertainty. Finally, they can act as "tech diplomats" who connect government OSPOs across borders, creating what one speaker called a "diplomatic corps of open source professionals" to share solutions and jointly fund maintenance.In addition, according to Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (ZenDiS) Director, Adriana Groh, OSPOs can help upstream open-source projects serve as the foundation for digital sovereignty efforts. Groh said governments can't rely on open-source volunteers as "involuntary suppliers" of critical components and must treat foundational open source like roads and bridges – infrastructure that the public sector has a duty to maintain, not just consume.She proposed a layered view: a cooperative layer where states, companies, and communities co‑fund and co‑maintain shared components, and a competitive layer where vendors and agencies differentiate on services built on top.In that model, sovereignty means having choices in the competitive layer because the cooperative layer is robust, open, and collectively resourced. Without that, dependence on a handful of hyperscalers and large vendors is structurally baked in.Vendors, hyperscalers, and infrastructure Industry voices acknowledged that AI adds a new dependency stack – GPUs, energy, and capital‑heavy infrastructure – that software openness alone cannot solve. But they argued that keeping the software and orchestration layers open remains the best available lever for sovereignty. It also means you don't have to rely on American-based hyperscalers and datacenters for AI. Gupta pointed to a growing ecosystem of "local sovereign cloud partners" running Nvidia's stack in country, and stressed that his job is to "make sure that stack stays open source," from kernel to orchestration to generation frameworks, so that governments can own their compute, data, and skills even while relying on major hardware vendors.Also: 5 ways to grow your business with AI - without leaving employees behindNextcloud CEO and founder Frank Karlitschek pushed back on the narrative that only US hyperscalers can provide "future‑proof" infrastructure, arguing that "there's also a bit of a marketing problem" and that countless Nextcloud instances and other workloads are already running at scale on non‑hyperscaler infrastructure.He and others suggested that a more decentralized infrastructure landscape, built on open platforms, is entirely technically feasible; what's missing is political will, procurement reform, and investment in public and community capacity.Converging digital sovereigntyThroughout the week, speakers stressed that "digital sovereignty" should not be equated with national isolation. Kairuki captured the consensus in a line many speakers later echoed: this is "about ownership in partnership, but not independence," and "when we open our solutions, we multiply them. Let's put our citizens, not our vendors, at the very center."Ireland's McKeever framed it similarly as "maintaining meaningful control, choice and resilience" over technologies underpinning public services, while European officials emphasized "strategic dependencies" – having "more than just one" provider and being an active participant in shared infrastructures.Gago pushed the concept into AI: sovereignty as the ability to change models, move workloads, and audit systems without losing continuity, and to "participate in a global ecosystem without surrendering to other people's terms of service."Where countries still diverge is on how far and how fast to go, and how much to invest. But at the UN this week, everyone agreed that "digital sovereignty without open source is a contradiction in terms."The United States has noticed this trend toward open source and digital sovereignty, and the Trump government doesn't appear to be on board. In a statement aimed at the UN meeting, Jacob Helberg, US, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, wrote that countries striving for digital sovereignty can only achieve "a kind of synchronized mediocrity—a planet of subscale clones, each heroically reconstructing last year's breakthrough while the breakthrough itself moves on without them." Heiberg added, "While others rebuild the present, American firms will be inventing the future."At the United Nations, this America-first view was treated with contempt. As one person who didn't want to be quoted put it, "Open source is what builds the future, not the f

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