Jensen Huang made his pitch.
The CEO of the world’s first $4 trillion company met with President Trump and pushed to restart Nvidia chip sales to China, challenging the U.S.’s hawkish AI stance. He won over Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who said the goal is to get Chinese developers “addicted to the American technology stack.”
Shortly after, Nvidia announced it would resume H20 chip sales to China while ramping up U.S. production with a $500 billion investment.
OpenAI’s massive datacenter deal in the UAE and Nvidia’s freshly unbanned H20s reflect Washington’s new playbook: sell the shovels, keep the mines — awesome for Nvidia, awful for AWS, catnip for every sovereign startup.
From Sweden to Singapore, governments are racing to bottle lightning before the price of a prompt hits zero. Beneath the concrete and coolant is a simple truth: AI independence is national sovereignty. Forget gold reserves and space programs. Power today is measured literally in gigawatts and petaflops per capita. The irony is that true digital sovereignty now depends on one American company. For this plan to work, Nvidia must become the global supplier of independence.
And it's not just the UAE making large investments:
Canada dropped $2B to make “strategic investments in public and commercial infrastructure.”
Japan bought thousands of Nvidia H200s for its new AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI 3.0) supercomputer.
The French government is constructing a “cloud de confiance” (cloud of confidentiality) that is already hosting a version of Microsoft Azure.
India’s IndiaAI Mission aims to democratize compute with 10,000+ GPUs and national datasets.
xAI is partnering with Saudi Arabia to build and lease 200MW of data-center.
And South Korea's 3GW data center, the world’s largest, is under construction.
Stateside, the AI buildout is in full swing. In Pennsylvania alone, Trump recently touted more than $90 billion in new AI and energy investments. Hyperscalers like Google, CoreWeave, and Meta are in a frantic race to secure grid capacity.
It’s easier to conceptualize these companies’ growth by their energy demands. Digital factories already consume more than 4% of the nation's electricity, a figure projected to triple to 12% by 2028.That is playing out in real-time in northern Virginia, where the construction of 30 new data centers in just two years has “Data Center Alley” residents facing a 50% increase in electricity bills.
But the promise of “AI sovereignty” keeps countries pushing ahead.
Here’s my take on the news:
The age of relying on someone else’s cloud (at least for the government) is over.
The same hyperscalers begging for megawatts could quietly become the Pentagon’s favorite Trojan horse. Every one of those gleaming new data centers comes pre-wired with a backdoor handshake to Washington. No, not in the crude sense of a literal switch, port, or door, but in the invisible way that modern sovereignty works: through standards, firmware, and the quiet insertion of compute modules that answer to a .gov root certificate before they answer to anyone else.
The U.S. doesn’t need to own every rack or risk; it just needs to own the trust anchor. A single line of code in the boot ROM — signed by NIST, blessed by CISA, and baked into every H200, B200, and whatever comes next. The compute is sovereign, the power is local, but the keys are quietly federated back to the U.S.
The house always wins, or something like that.
Call it “cloud capitalism with American characteristics.” Washington gets to project soft power and secure its AI supply chain without a single line item in the defense budget. Abu Dhabi gets the keys to a 21st-century economy and a permanent alliance with U.S. corporate interests. And the American taxpayer? They get to watch their 401ks swell as Big Tech books tens of billions in revenue, all while footing precisely zero of the bill for this new global security architecture.
Of course, the plan only works as long as nobody calls the bluff. The moment a major power or a coalition of non-aligned nations develops a viable, open-source alternative — a 'de-Americanized' chip or stack — this entire strategy collapses. Washington lifted the Nvidia ban, but Beijing isn’t taking any more chances. Xi’s response was the Huawei Ascend 910 AI chip.
Still Nvidia shares bounced 9% on the news.
If the U.S. leverages the standards and firmware in its exports, it could accelerate the very 'splinternet' we fear, turning its current market dominance into a long-term strategic liability as the world rushes to build a truly sovereign alternative.
Alternatives that will most certainly be new startups. Like the Slovakia-based Tatra Supercompute that gives its EU customers access to powerful clusters of NVIDIA H100s — all GDPR compliant. Or Lumina CloudInfra, which is focused on building India's sovereign AI platform, defining the standards and digital public infrastructure needed to ensure the nation's data and AI destiny are its own. And Seattle-based Hedgehog (Ascend portco) is connecting everything together with its open-source, Kubernetes-native fabric that automates the deployment of high-performance, inference networks. Essential for anyone building their own cloud.
As someone who gets a kick out of running models directly in the browser using WebGPU, or on my laptop, I've seen a glimpse of a decentralized future where the compute happens at the edge, on the user's terms. So I understand these countries' desire for local digital control. It’s the same impulse that drives a developer to spin up a home lab instead of swiping a corporate credit card on AWS.
The grand American strategy is a bet that convenience will always trump sovereignty. A bet that "it just works" is more powerful than "we own it." But that bet only pays off until the moment it doesn't. So stay tuned!