Governments are spending billions on their own ‘sovereign’ AI technologies – is it a big waste of money?
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As part of a trend loosely called ‘sovereign AI’, governments around the world are developing their own AI technologies Illustration: Getty Images
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As part of a trend loosely called ‘sovereign AI’, governments around the world are developing their own AI technologies Illustration: Getty Images
Artificial intelligence (AI)
# Governments are spending billions on their own ‘sovereign’ AI technologies – is it a big waste of money?
Many US-built AI systems fall short but competing against tech giants neither easy nor cheap
Aisha Down
Wed 8 Oct 2025 20.32 EDTLast modified on Wed 8 Oct 2025 20.34 EDT
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In Singapore, a government-funded artificial intelligence model can converse in 11 languages, from Bahasa Indonesia to Lao. In Malaysia, ILMUchat, built by a local construction conglomerate, boasts that it “knows which Georgetown you’re referring to” – that is, the capital of Penang and not the private university in the US. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s Apertus, unveiled in September, understands when to use the Swiss German “ss” and not the German-language character “ß”.
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Around the world, language models like these are part of an AI arms race worth hundreds of billions of dollars mostly driven by a few powerful companies in the US and China. As giants such as OpenAI, Meta and Alibaba plough vast sums into developing increasingly powerful models, middle powers and developing countries are watching the landscape carefully, and sometimes placing their own, expensive bets.
Those bets are all part of a trend loosely called “sovereign AI”, in which governments around the world, from the UK to India to Canada, are developing their own AI technologies and attempting to define their place in t