AI capability an organization or nation holds entirely under its own control, so no outside provider can reprice it or switch it off.
Sovereign AI is AI capability that an organization or nation owns outright, from the hardware and models to the data and the people who operate them, so its use never depends on an outside provider's jurisdiction or terms.
The term gained prominence as governments recognized that national AI capability running on foreign infrastructure can be repriced or cut off by whoever controls that infrastructure. The same logic applies one level down: an enterprise whose intelligence layer runs entirely on rented models and third-party clouds can access AI but does not own the capability.
The enterprise form of Sovereign AI is Private AI operated inside Secure Enterprise Boundaries: models served on owned infrastructure, data that never leaves the perimeter, and operational control that does not depend on a vendor's roadmap. Data Sovereignty covers the data alone, and Sovereign AI carries the same control up through the models and the systems that run them.
See also Private AI, Secure Enterprise Boundaries, Data Sovereignty, Digital Transformation and Enterprise Architecture.