If Data Sovereignty Isn't on Your Map, You Should Think About Putting It There. And Soon

We have been talking to a lot of businesses recently, and one phrase keeps coming up: data sovereignty. We surveyed a group of business leaders around the globe on how big an issue it is, and 89% told us that data sovereignty has moved up their priority list in the last 12 months.

Something that used to be considered a minor item—or something for the compliance teams to sort out—is now a topic of conversation in boardrooms worldwide.

Data sovereignty is reshaping infrastructure decisions. CIOs are evaluating vendor choices, AI platform deployment, and control over their tech stack through a sovereignty lens. Get it wrong, and customer trust – and the data behind it – goes with it.

Data sovereignty is a competitive advantage, but what that advantage is depends on the locationlink to this section

And while many assume that data sovereignty is an issue that only Europeans get concerned about, our conversations showed that this was not the case. The US, in particular, is all over this.

In the US (93%), where regulatory pressure has historically been lighter, CIOs are treating sovereignty as a competitive architecture decision, not a compliance requirement. They're asking: "If our data stays in jurisdictions we control, what capabilities can we build that others can't?" This is purely an infrastructure strategy. GDPR isn't the driver here; competitive advantage is.

In France (93%), stricter data residency laws have forced the conversation earlier and louder than in most markets. French CIOs don't have the luxury of treating this as a future problem. It's active architectural work now.

In the UK (91%), post-Brexit data law reshuffled the entire playbook. The conversation shifted from "Where can we put data?" to "Where can we keep data?" Infrastructure location went from a preference to a structural requirement.

In Australia and Ireland (both 85%), the pressure comes from a different angle – and so does the opportunity. For Australian CIOs, sovereignty is a competitive advantage: control over customer data wins deals and builds loyalty in a market where trust is a true differentiator. For Irish CIOs managing GDPR alongside multinational complexity, it's about redesigning infrastructure that works across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

What unites these numbers is that CIOs everywhere are no longer retrofitting sovereignty into existing platforms. They're building it into the architecture from the start. That's the inflection point the survey captured. That's what the percentages actually measure.

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This stat was discovered as part of a series of conversations with business leaders in Australia, France, the Republic of Ireland, the UK, and the US. We'll be releasing more findings in the coming months.