Why I created r/SovereignIT

I have been working around technological sovereignty for years now – six of them at OVHcloud, and since then at Clever Cloud, where I am VP DevRel. For most of that time, raising the subject in a technical conversation produced one of two reactions: polite boredom, or the assumption that I was making a political argument. Sovereignty was a word for ministries and industrial policy papers. It did not seem to belong in a discussion about where you deploy your application.

That has changed, and not because anyone won the argument.

The dependencies stopped being hypothetical

Cloud infrastructure has concentrated into a handful of providers. US extraterritorial law reaches data held on European soil, and the legal reasoning about how far it reaches keeps moving. Access to AI models and to the compute that trains them is controlled by a small number of companies, in a small number of countries. Semiconductor supply chains run through chokepoints that were invisible until they were not. European technology companies keep being acquired by foreign groups, usually with a press release about continuity and investment.

None of this is new. What changed is that the consequences became legible. These are no longer theoretical questions about who owns what. They decide who controls our data, our infrastructure and the technologies we cannot operate without, and – this matters more – what choices Europe still has during a political, economic or technological crisis. A dependency you have not examined is a decision you have already made, without noticing you made it.

The conversation exists, the place does not

Here is what frustrates me. A story breaks: an acquisition, a court ruling, a procurement decision, a model release with restricted access, a new regulation that will or will not do what it claims. It generates a good conversation for about a day and a half, spread across three social networks, a couple of newsletters and a conference hallway. Then it disappears.

The next story arrives and starts from zero, as if the previous one had never happened. Nobody connects them, because there is nowhere to connect them. The individual events are not, on their own, that interesting. The pattern they form is the whole point, and the pattern is exactly what gets lost.

So yesterday I created a subreddit: r/SovereignIT.

It is in English, deliberately. I work in France, and a good part of my daily conversation on this happens in French, but technological sovereignty is not a French concern. It is European, and beyond that international. I want people from different countries and different technological ecosystems in the same thread, including people whose national situation looks nothing like ours.

What goes there

Roughly: European cloud providers and digital infrastructure. Technological dependencies and strategic autonomy. Open source, open standards, interoperability and reversibility. European technology companies, how they are funded and who buys them. The role of US hyperscalers in Europe. Data sovereignty and extraterritorial legislation. AI sovereignty – models, compute, infrastructure. Semiconductors, hardware and supply chains. Public procurement, regulation and industrial policy. And criticism of the whole sovereignty agenda, which I will come back to.

What I am not trying to do is collect everything containing the word "sovereignty". Most of what carries that label is noise. The filter is whether a link reveals a real dependency, a real strategic choice or a real trade-off, and whether it is worth the time of somebody who already knows the basics.

It is not a Clever Cloud community

This is a personal initiative. r/SovereignIT is not an official Clever Cloud anything.

My job obviously shapes how I see these questions – I spend my days around European cloud infrastructure and the people who choose it or refuse it, and that is a useful vantage point. Clever Cloud news will occasionally be relevant there. But the subreddit has to stay much larger than one company, and it must never turn into a promotional channel. If it becomes a place where the answer to every sovereignty question happens to be my employer, it will have failed, and it will deserve to.

Sovereignty is not autarky

The subreddit should not celebrate something merely because it is European, or because a marketing team decided to call it sovereign.

Technological sovereignty is a great deal more complicated than replacing every American product with a European equivalent. The real work is figuring out which dependencies actually matter, where Europe needs genuine independent capacity, where open standards and the ability to leave are sufficient, where international partnerships are necessary and healthy, and where we can build enough leverage to keep our options open. Sovereignty, as I understand it, is not self-sufficiency. It is understanding your dependencies, choosing them deliberately, and remaining able to change your mind.

Which is why counterarguments are not a tolerated inconvenience there, they are part of the material. Criticism of protectionism. Badly designed regulation, and there is plenty. "Sovereign" alternatives that are simply worse and ask to be adopted out of duty. Fantasies about rebuilding entire technology stacks from sand upwards. Sovereignty used as an empty label to win a public tender. All of that belongs.

What I would like it to become

A place to find the news and the analysis that are actually worth reading. A shared archive where a single event can be connected to the larger trend it belongs to. Somewhere practitioners, researchers, policymakers and interested citizens can argue in the same thread. A place where claims about sovereignty get questioned instead of repeated.

I am not going to manufacture activity. I would rather post four things a week with enough context to start a real conversation than forty links that nobody opens.

If any of this interests you, come and join. Post what you are reading. Answer someone. And if you think the whole technological sovereignty agenda is misguided, protectionist or naive, that is an argument I want to see in there, made properly.