For all the hullaballoo, handwringing and hyperventilating, the market this year is reckoned to total just $4.5 billion and is forecast to climb to about $8.7 billion by 2032. For comparison, the global coffee market is valued between $263 billion to $270 billion in 2026; revenue at Lawson, the ubiquitous convenience store, is ¥3.02 trillion, or about $19.10 billion. The contrast between the size and significance of the global rare-earths market underscores the need for nuance when discussing economic security, especially as attention turns to “technology sovereignty,” a phrase that has become shorthand for an increasingly urgent and intense debate among governments as they race to assure access to critical technologies and insulate themselves from vulnerabilities created by ever-extended supply chains.
Sovereignty is a tough nut to crack in a deeply interconnected, digital world. Cyberspace sits poorly atop the virtual world, although the notion that physical borders have no impact is laughable. Bill Clinton’s famous crack that trying to control the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall has been repeatedly disproven.
Just ask the protesters in, I don’t know, almost any authoritarian country — a couple of democracies, too — when they’ve had their connections cut. The debate about tech sovereignty typically reflects another concern, however. It stems from fears that reliance on foreign technology in virtually any of its manifestations erodes a nation’s own freedoms or sovereignty.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is dealing with this danger daily as he struggles to connect Ukraine’s telecommunications networks to its drones and defense systems. Karine Brunet, the chief operations and delivery officer of Capgemini, a consulting firm, explained earlier this year that tech sovereignty “encompasses multiple dimensions of sovereignty.” It includes “data (control over data storage, access and governance); operational (autonomy and resilience in managing and executing digital operations safely); technical (development and control, including hardware and infrastructure); and even legal sovereignty (power to establish and enforce the regulations that govern digital infrastructures, technology actors, services and data within its territory).” It is, she concluded, “a cornerstone of economic resilience, national security and competitiveness.” Victor Ferguson, a professor at Hitotsubashi University, breaks the concept into two, somewhat more digestible, pieces. He explained via email that “the first concerns access, ensuring reliable availability of the AI tools a country depends on, and of the inputs upstream of them (chips, compute, cloud infrastructure, energy), so that they can’t be cut off.” The second addresses “control over what the models actually do: the values embedded in them, the information they present, how far they reflect a society’s own preferences, etc.
Failure to have sufficient control over this raises the risk that repeated everyday interactions with these systems gradually shape agendas, beliefs and even preferences themselves in ways that are at odds with ‘values previously acquired.’” In conversations last week in Taiwan, there was considerable confidence that the island had the first covered. Ferguson, who joined those talks, agreed, highlighting the repeated reference to “economic indispensability” in those discussions. Titus Chen, professor at National Chengchi University, drove the point home in email, arguing that “advanced chips manufactured in or by Taiwan are essential to tech sovereignty and the economic security of Western countries.
The West cannot afford a Taiwan under PRC rule or control.” By contrast, there was concern about the second element as Taiwan is largely a consumer of the models even when it runs its own data. Europe has no confidence in either count. Estimates of Europe’s dependence on foreign technology run from 80% to 90% of its digital infrastructure.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
