The Difference Engine | B2B Category Design | Private Equity | Venture Capital
Oct 21, 2026 · 39 min · 11 segments
Who controls our tech? Technological sovereignty is about far more than just geography. It’s a story of power, politics, law, ownership, and innovation. In this episode, we explore the forces that…
Jonathan SimnettHost
Paul MaherHost
While we're talking about sovereignty, we think we need to really distinguish between arguments about this.
So we Europeans, we think, should distinguish physical sovereignty from operational sovereignty.
And we believe treating the former as an inherent property of infrastructure is conceptually, shall we say, at the best possible.
For instance, Sovereign could describe the control regime around a data center, not as it's often confused with the nationality of the hardware sitting inside it.
Yeah, like the hardware carries a passport, right? So the idea of inherent sovereignty in a data center is actually a fallacy because sovereignty is not a physical characteristic that can be embedded in a server or a GPU or a storage array or the building itself.
A machine does not become sovereign because it's located within a particular national border, just as foreign-made hardware does not automatically make an otherwise locally governed service non-sovereign, right? So what matters operationally is who has authority, access, and control over the data and the systems processing
And the reason that we're somewhat exercised about Mr. Andreessen talking about AI and whether Europe wants to be left behind is AI and sovereignty are very close bedfellows.
called Beyond.pl, and they have a factory in a place that Paul and I are very, very fond of.
And for those of you who might be following a certain – football club that might be having a few problems with the authority, you'll be very familiar with the idea of the Poznan because it's what we Manchester City fans are currently doing to the football authorities.
Anyway, in Poznan is beyond PL's AI factory and the way they've handled this illustrates this distinction very well.
Now, as you'd expect to an AI factory, the facility itself uses U.S. origin, maybe not U.S. manufactured, NVIDIA compute, and ever-pure storage.
Yet BeyondPL argues that the service can still be sovereign because the operating company is Polish, right? Not only is it Polish, it's subject to Polish law and regulations.
an additional level, EU law, and that it does not have access to customers' underlying data beyond infrastructure telemetry.
While we're talking about sovereignty, we think we need to really distinguish between arguments about this.
So we Europeans, we think, should distinguish physical sovereignty from operational sovereignty.
And we believe treating the former as an inherent property of infrastructure is conceptually, shall we say, at the best possible.
For instance, Sovereign could describe the control regime around a data center, not as it's often confused with the nationality of the hardware sitting inside it.
Yeah, like the hardware carries a passport, right? So the idea of inherent sovereignty in a data center is actually a fallacy because sovereignty is not a physical characteristic that can be embedded in a server or a GPU or a storage array or the building itself.
A machine does not become sovereign because it's located within a particular national border, just as foreign-made hardware does not automatically make an otherwise locally governed service non-sovereign, right? So what matters operationally is who has authority, access, and control over the data and the systems processing
And the reason that we're somewhat exercised about Mr. Andreessen talking about AI and whether Europe wants to be left behind is AI and sovereignty are very close bedfellows.
called Beyond.pl, and they have a factory in a place that Paul and I are very, very fond of.
And for those of you who might be following a certain – football club that might be having a few problems with the authority, you'll be very familiar with the idea of the Poznan because it's what we Manchester City fans are currently doing to the football authorities.
Anyway, in Poznan is beyond PL's AI factory and the way they've handled this illustrates this distinction very well.
Now, as you'd expect to an AI factory, the facility itself uses U.S. origin, maybe not U.S. manufactured, NVIDIA compute, and ever-pure storage.
Yet BeyondPL argues that the service can still be sovereign because the operating company is Polish, right? Not only is it Polish, it's subject to Polish law and regulations.
an additional level, EU law, and that it does not have access to customers' underlying data beyond infrastructure telemetry.
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