Sovereign cloud is no longer an emerging trend — it’s becoming a non-negotiable requirement for enterprises scaling artificial intelligence globally.

As enterprises shift from AI experiments to production-grade deployments, their infrastructure needs are evolving rapidly. The pressure is on to support composable architectures, low-latency performance and policy-based data residency — all within regulated borders. That’s why sovereign cloud is rising in prominence: It ensures compliance, governance and operational control across geopolitical regions while still enabling innovation at scale, according to Kevin Cochrane (pictured, right), chief marketing officer of Vultr, a registered trademark of The Constant Company LLC.

TheCUBE on set at RAISE Summit.

“There’s actually two vectors to sovereignty. There’s basically, from a national government perspective, ensuring that there is sufficient AI infrastructure, GPU compute so that digital startups, universities, research labs have the capacity that they need in order to innovate and build the future,” Cochrane said. “That’s good for the economy. That’s good for societal welfare. But there’s another aspect to sovereignty as well, which is every single enterprise that’s building and deploying a global application also needs to be adherent to local market regulations.”

Cochrane spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier (left) at RAISE Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how sovereign cloud has become a critical foundation for scaling AI in regulated industries, enabling enterprises to meet compliance and governance requirements while accelerating innovation across borders. (* Disclosure below.)

Why sovereign cloud is core to enterprise AI success

Meeting sovereignty requirements is no longer just about compliance — it’s about ensuring AI systems can operate securely and effectively within national boundaries. The two-fold nature of sovereignty lies in national infrastructure and enterprise-level governance, according to Cochrane.

“The data sets that they’re using to train and tune and infirm model are going to be resident within a geographic boundary,” he said. “The agents that they’re deploying are only going to be able to communicate in many cases within that geographic boundary. There’s all sorts of controls. The issue of sovereignty actually also matters for the enterprise.”

This need for localized governance is especially urgent in healthcare, financial services and other heavily regulated industries. Vultr’s approach includes prebuilt infrastructure templates tailored for compliance — allowing developers to deploy AI-native applications with speed and confidence. By productizing infrastructure-as-code stacks, Vultr helps organizations reduce the time from proof of concept to production, Cochrane explained.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you wanted to deploy a healthcare agent that was HIPAA compliant, GDPR compliant in all the different regions that you’re operating here in Europe and it was as easy as taking a Terraform template and then just clicking a button and just spinning up all the infrastructure for pill test and deployment within 10 seconds?” he asked. “That helps break the bottleneck of going from POC to production if you actually show people a golden path.”

Vultr’s sovereign cloud capabilities are not an add-on; they’re embedded into the architecture. The company’s on-demand infrastructure model and open ecosystem approach allow enterprises to customize deployments while maintaining strict control over data, networking and compute layers. With compliance baked in, organizations avoid the trap of retrofitting governance after the fact — a risk that can delay or even derail AI projects, according to Cochrane.

“We always have this motto which is let’s not do the traditional thing and move fast and break things, because in the day and age of AI, if we move fast, we won’t break things, we’ll shatter things and we won’t be able to necessarily put them back together again,’” he said. “We actually do think that being very intentional about how we’re standing up new AI and Infrastructure really matters.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of RAISE Summit:

(* Disclosure: Vultr, a registered trademark of The Constant Company LLC, sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Vultr nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE