Data Sovereignty in the Age of Cloud Computing & AI

In an era of increasing digitization, data sovereignty - the right of governments and organizations to own, control, and access their data - has never been more important. And with the rise of cloud computing and AI, it has never felt more at risk.

For our Digital Public Goods, mWater and Solstice, data sovereignty has been foundational from the beginning. Users own and control every piece of data on the platform: assigning permissions, exporting data in readily usable formats, and removing it entirely at any time, for free. Governments retain full ownership of their data even after a project ends, independent of any continued funding or partnership. This extends to how we integrate AI. Our AI-powered features, from guided survey design to automated data cleaning to our API Integrator, are built so that no user data is ever accessed or used by AI models. All AI tools operate solely on platform infrastructure, keeping every user's data fully private.

Our cloud-based infrastructure reinforces rather than undermines sovereignty. Enterprise-grade encryption, continuous backups, and disaster recovery provide protections that most governments and organizations could not replicate independently, while users can download and keep offline copies of their data whenever they choose. For governments with deeper sovereignty requirements, we also offer an open-source server initiative that allows organizations to self-host their own instance, ensuring continuity of access regardless of funding or partnerships.

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how data sovereignty can be maintained, and even strengthened, through AI and cloud computing, with a concrete solution they can adopt directly or use as a benchmark when evaluating any platform they work with.