Quantum & AI Sovereignty Senior Advisor at Levio | Sovereign cloud, AI infrastructure & post-quantum security for governments | Co-chair, Global Data Pledge
Canada
Joined March 2009
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Rome, the morning after a reception. The night before I asked an African ambassador a blunt question: do you agree your country will never spend $500bn on AI, or anything close?
He agreed at once. Nobody from a small country is offended by that.
The German was. 🧵
The instrument is already in the room. Public procurement in Europe: ~14% of GDP, over €2 trillion a year.
Nobody in the middle can match a hegemon's capex. Everybody in the middle has a procurement budget.
Coordinated demand is the weapon that doesn't require matching anyone.
The failure mode is the talking shop: communiqués while the capacity gap widens.
The difference between a coalition and a communiqué is whether it builds shared infrastructure or shared positions.
Episode 3 of 9 → richardstpierre.com/mosaic-d…
Rome. Across the table, a European tech investor who'd just opened a research centre in Beijing.
I explain an idea that sounds far-fetched the first time. Four sentences in, he finishes it for me:
"So you mean a Canadian embassy data centre in China."
Yes. Exactly. 🧵
The right objection: a diplomatic note doesn't encrypt anything.
Correct. Legal status without technical detachability is theatre.
What makes it real: you hold the keys, you control the network path, you can run it yourself — and you can leave.
Declaring that data centres can hold sovereign status is a stroke of a pen. An afternoon, a press conference.
Building the architecture that makes the declaration enforceable is three years nobody will write about.
Most countries will do the first part only.
Episode 2 of 9 → richardstpierre.com/mosaic-d…
Vatican, May. I'm on a panel about inequality with a co-founder of the movement that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mid-sentence, I stop. The word I've just used with total confidence no longer covers what I've been watching for two years. 🧵
The best objection is diffusion. Printing, electricity, mobile — those gaps closed.
But what diffused was the artefact. What's scarce now is the substrate: gigawatts, capital at 100bn scale, four-year build times.
Software crosses borders in seconds. Substations don't.
You can hand a country a model.
You cannot hand it the ability to train the next one.
The first act of sovereignty isn't building anything. It's admitting your instruments have stopped working.
Episode 1 of 9 → richardstpierre.com/mosaic-d…
