Red Hat: The UK Needs Digital Sovereignty for AI Ambitions

Since coming to power in the summer of 2024, the UK’s Labour Party has emphasised again and again its ambitions of making the country an AI superpower.

“Artificial intelligence will drive incredible change in our country,” says UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. 

“From teachers personalising lessons, to supporting small businesses with their record-keeping, to speeding up planning applications, it has the potential to transform the lives of working people.”

The recent state visit of US President Donald Trump brought with it a wave of announcements from major US companies, committing investments to the future of British AI.

While Starmer and co. are enamoured with the practical benefits AI could have on the lives of British people – as well as the obvious financial boost the technology could give the British economy – they are also looking to establish a degree of digital sovereignty with these investments.

What is digital sovereignty?

Digital sovereignty is a hot topic right now. 

In simple terms, it refers to the state of being in control of one’s own digital infrastructure, whether that’s data centres, AI systems or any technologies necessary for facilitating digital life as we know it.

For Jonny Williams, the Chief Digital Adviser for the UK Public Sector at Red Hat, establishing technological sovereignty will be essential for the country in the coming years.

“Digital sovereignty isn't a luxury – it's an urgent, practical requirement if the UK is to lead in AI,” he says.

“AI sovereignty allows the UK to have greater control over who accesses local data and how it is used.”

An approach like this addresses privacy and security concerns while helping public services and businesses deploy technology more efficiently.

However, Jonny warns that "true sovereignty is built on more than just hardware", suggesting that data is also incredibly important.

The power of open source technologies

One route to digital sovereignty, especially when it comes to AI, is through the use of open source platforms.

A new collaboration between Red Hat and Great Wave AI is showcasing just how this can work.

Jack Perschke, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Great Wave and he describes large language models (LLMs) as being "like crude oil".

In short, they are valuable, but they need refinement if they are to become usable, useful products.

His platform acts as the refinery, transforming raw model capabilities into purpose-built tools for organisations.

“In an era where prompts and responses can't be encrypted inside the model itself, the safest option is often running it in your own environment,” Jack explains.

This is something that resonates with Jonny, Jack’s collaborator, too. 

“Open source AI fosters provides the flexibility and transparency for the UK to host, audit, and scale AI entirely on-shore,” he says.

“This is critical for establishing a secure and trusted AI ecosystem.”

The three-tier adoption challenge

Jack sees three distinct layers in the UK's AI market right now, each with varying levels of maturity and opportunity.

The top tier includes Gen AI built into enterprise systems like Salesforce integrating AI into customer relationship management.

Individual productivity tools such as Microsoft Copilot and sector-specific assistants like Harvey for legal work comprise the bottom layer.

However, Jack sees the greatest potential in the middle layer, which he describes as “bespoke, organisation-specific, multi-agent data transformation”.

He estimates adoption of this crucial middle layer “at a fraction of 1%” despite its significant value potential.

Without proper orchestration platforms, organisations risk creating ungoverned "AI sprawl" with inconsistent standards and uncontrolled agent communication.

Building domestic capabilities

Though the recent slew of foreign investments in the UK from the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft and Google has been heralded as transformative, securing the services of skilled professionals to oversee these future projects will be imperative to any success.

"AI sovereignty requires an investment into homegrown talent and companies that can transition the UK from pilots to sovereign AI at scale,” Jonny explains.

This includes developing workforce capabilities and fostering innovations in areas like small language models that maintain sovereignty without compromising speed or innovation.

The UK Home Office's US$3m tender for first-year discovery and design illustrates the significant costs organisations face when building AI capabilities from scratch.

Great Wave's platform offers a proven alternative that aligns with emerging regulatory requirements.

Strategic recommendations

For organisations just beginning their AI journey, Jack recommends bringing “all AI initiatives under one working group” and ordering them by complexity to secure early wins before progressing to harder use cases.

He emphasises that “agent orchestration is inevitable” and advises organisations to “decide early whether to build or buy it”.

Jonny concludes that the UK's success depends on combining “world-class infrastructure, open source capabilities and local expertise” to deliver AI innovation that is “not only powerful, but secure, transparent, and trusted by the public”.

The collaboration between Red Hat and Great Wave AI represents a practical approach to making AI adoption more sovereign and scalable for UK organisations moving from pilots into production while maintaining control over data, costs and future direction.