As enterprises and governments race to control their data, models and compliance obligations, sovereign AI infrastructure is emerging as both a technical and geopolitical imperative.

In the latest episode of theCUBE Research’s AppDevANGLE podcast, Sudeep Goswami, chief executive officer of Traefik Labs Inc., joined theCUBE and SiliconANGLE’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack what “true sovereignty” means — and why cloud-agnostic design, offline safety pipelines and agent governance are becoming cornerstones of enterprise AI.

“The sovereign AI opportunity is enormous,” Goswami said. “But it only matters if organizations can actually control their stack — architecturally, operationally and economically.”

Redefining sovereign AI

Goswami framed sovereignty around three principles: architectural control, operational independence and escape velocity.

Architectural control means running the entire AI stack (gateways, models, safety systems and governance) inside an enterprise’s chosen environment, without relying on a vendor’s uptime or terms. Operational independence ensures governance and security policies travel with workloads across any deployment. Escape velocity means freedom from proprietary application programming interfaces or formats that make it costly to leave a provider.

He cautioned that data residency, hybrid cloud and vendor-managed sovereignty are not true sovereignty if the enterprise remains dependent on another entity’s infrastructure or policies.

Offline safety pipelines

AI safety, Goswami argued, can no longer depend on cloud APIs. Traditional moderation models create latency, single points of failure and metadata exposure, which are all non-starters for regulated or air-gapped environments.

In partnership with NVIDIA NIM, Traefik Labs built a fully offline safety pipeline for:

• Topic control — keeping AI outputs within approved domains.
• Content safety — detecting PII, toxic data or policy violations.
• Jailbreak detection — stopping adversarial prompts before they execute.

Running locally allows organizations in defense, healthcare and finance to maintain compliance without exposing data or dependencies.

Cloud-agnostic deployment and the path forward

Organizations are shifting from asking “Can I deploy AI?” to “Can I control AI?” Goswami said. Traefik’s stack, from gateways to safety pipelines, is location- and deployment-agnostic, running with zero external dependencies across Oracle Cloud, sovereign regions, or offline environments.

He sees three market segments:

1. Cloud-native only — startups all-in on hyperscalers.
2. Cloud-first, sovereignty-aware — enterprises wanting agility with future portability.
3. Sovereignty-first — defense and regulated industries requiring full control.

“Our partnership with Oracle targets that middle tier,” he said. “Enterprises that want cloud benefits today but the freedom to move tomorrow.”

The bottom line

Sovereignty isn’t a marketing term, but rather a design principle. Enterprises must architect for portability, governance as code and metadata privacy from day one.

As Goswami put it, “The future of AI isn’t just about bigger models. It’s about who controls them, where they live, and how safely they operate.”

Listen to the full conversation with theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty and Sudeep Goswami, part of theCUBE Research’s AppDevANGLE podcast series.