Tech sovereignty in a "special relationship"

How much investment does the UK need in tech to be in a position where it can limit the impact of geopolitical turmoil and the goings on in the White House?

With King Charles having to navigate the narrow strait of UK/US diplomacy, that has more minefields than the Strait of Hormuz, concerns are being raised over how far the US administration will go to keep the UK in check.

The news headlines appear to suggest that this is exactly Trump’s game-plan: to question UK sovereignty of the Falkland Islands is probably not something Whitehall would have taken too seriously a few weeks ago, but it is now making front page news.

And tech buyers in the UK need to wake up to the potential risk of having one nation influence so much technology infrastructure. It may have taken Iranian minefields, then a US blockade, to cause oil prices to sky-rocket, but our reliance on US tech firma means someone only needs to flip a proverbial switch and we’re offline as the global flow of data that powers our economies is blocked.

Successive governments have attempted to build out a viable UK tech sector but these efforts are merely small change compared to the huge investments being made elsewhere.

Speaking about the age of disruption during a speech she gave at the Royal United Services Institute, technology secretary, Liz Kendall, said: “Why has China poured billions into the semiconductor industry? To catch up. Why does the US invest billions into drones and autonomous warfare? To stay ahead.”

As Kendall noted, the geopolitical settlement of the last 40 years has ruptured and technology is disrupting economies and societies in ways unimaginable a few years ago.

The UK government has little appetite to make the upfront investments needed to build out UK sovereign tech capabilities. To quote Kendall: “For Britain, AI sovereignty is about reducing over-dependencies and increasing resilience in key national strategic priorities.”

It is interesting to see what our European neighbours have been doing. In March office.eu was launched. Based on the OpenOffice suite, it is partly built on the European Nextcloud open source platform. It claims to offer organisations a secure by design alternative to non-European office software, and includes email, document management and collaboration tools.

And at Mobile World Congress the European Commission unveiled Euro-3C, a €75 million project to develop Europe’s first large-scale federated telco-edge-cloud infrastructure, supported by Horizon Europe.

None of these initiatives represent the billions needed for true digital independence from the US, but Kendall wants to build an alliance of “middle power nations”, which will somehow try to replicate the success Canada prime minister, Mark Carney has achieved, in exerting influence over its larger neighbour.