AI Sovereignty: Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Beyond

Around the world, governments are investing in shared AI infrastructure to retain control over core digital capabilities rather than relying entirely on commercial platforms. This session examines what U.S. agencies can learn from international efforts to build AI systems that are transparent, inclusive, and governed in the public interest.

Participants will explore Spain’s ALIA initiative—the European Union’s first publicly funded, open, multilingual AI infrastructure—which provides transparent language models in Spanish and co-official languages, supported by public governance and national supercomputing capacity. The session also examines Sweden’s model for shared AI capacity and cross-sector collaboration, as well as Switzerland’s federated approach to governance, data portability, and interoperability.

Rather than focusing on national policy alone, this session looks at the design choices behind these efforts: public investment in shared models and compute, open standards, verification and oversight, and institutional arrangements that preserve long-term public control. Participants will assess how similar approaches could translate to the U.S. context—through state or regional consortia, public-academic partnerships, or shared service models—without requiring a single national platform.