IBM launches AI-ready software for digital sovereignty

IBM is launching the new software to address the growing desire for digital sovereignty, as organisations worldwide are facing a growing imperative to have more control over their technology infrastructure.

The software is designed to help customers achieve verifiable sovereignty and full operational control – building, deploying and managing cloud-native and AI workloads under an organisation’s own authority. Build on Red Hat’s open-source foundation, Sovereign Core is expected to make sovereignty a critical property of the software itself.

“Businesses are facing growing pressure to innovate while meeting tightening regulatory requirements and recognising the importance of controlling how sensitive data and AI workloads are accessed and operated,” said Priya Srinivasan, general manager at IBM Software Products. “This shift is creating an urgent need for sovereign solutions that deliver AI-ready environments.

Organisations that deploy the software are expected to gain:

Customer-operated control plane: organisations maintain direct operational authority over software operations, deployment decisions and system configurations without intermediation from a vendor not in region.
In-boundary identity and keys: all authentication, authorisation, encryption keys and access management remain within jurisdiction boundaries under customer control.
Ongoing compliance enablement and generated evidence of continuous compliance: comprehensive operational data, system telemetry and audit trails are generated, stored and managed within the sovereign boundary, including automated identity.
Governed AI inference: AI model deployment and hosting, local GPU clusters, local inference execution and agent operations occur under local governance with traceability and oversight, without exporting data to external providers.
Ease of deployment: delivering sovereignty at scale with consistency and flexibility.

The platform comes as businesses around the world are looking at digital sovereignty. As the regulatory landscape evolves, enterprises and governments are seeking self-managed environments where they maintain complete operational authority – particularly as they deploy AI workloads that amplify sovereignty concerns.

According to IBM, most organisations currently lack a destination to land, modernise and re-host applications under sovereign control, including applications that will incorporate AI capabilities. According to Gartner, 75% of all enterprises will have a digital sovereignty strategy by 2030.

With IBM Sovereign Core, customers can deploy it in the environment of their choice, including in on-premises data centres, in-region cloud infrastructure or through IT service providers.

The technology giant is collaborating with IT service providers worldwide, starting with an initial rollout in Europe with Cegeka in Belgium and the Netherlands and Computacenter in Germany.

IBM said these partnerships will enable local independence and compliance management, enabling IT service providers to offer differentiated sovereign services to enterprises preparing for and running AI-scale workloads.

Srinivasan added: “With IBM Sovereign Core, we are helping clients move faster and with confidence – combining openness, compliance, and operational autonomy to meet the demands of the AI era, without the need to sacrifice sovereignty requirements.”

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