IBM today announced the launch of IBM Sovereign Core, the industry’s first AI-ready sovereign-enabled software for enterprises, governments, and service providers to build, deploy, and manage AI-ready sovereign environments. This new platform aims to give users more control over their technology infrastructure, especially as AI workloads and regulatory demands increase worldwide.
With digital sovereignty emerging as a board-level priority, and Gartner estimating that more than 75% of enterprises will formalize sovereignty strategies by 2030, IBM’s new offering seeks to address the gap between data residency and true operational autonomy over cloud and AI environments.
Addressing a Broader Sovereignty Challenge
Digital sovereignty goes well beyond where data is stored; it encompasses who controls the technology, how data and workloads are governed, and under whose jurisdiction critical systems operate. In practice, many organizations today lack a unified software foundation that enables them to manage these aspects, especially when deploying AI at scale.
IBM Sovereign Core is engineered to make sovereignty an intrinsic property of the environment itself, rather than an add-on layer to existing systems. Built on a Red Hat open source foundation, the platform enables customers to build, deploy and manage cloud-native and AI workloads under their own authority within a chosen jurisdiction.
Sovereignty as a Software Foundation
IBM Sovereign Core will help customers achieve verifiable sovereignty and full operational control. According to IBM, the core capabilities of the new software include:
- Customer-operated control plane: organizations maintain direct operational authority over software operations, deployment decisions, and system configurations without intermediation from a vendor not in region.
- In-boundary identity and key management: all authentication, authorization, encryption keys, and access management remain within jurisdiction boundaries under customer control.
- Continuous compliance and auditability: comprehensive operational data, system telemetry, and audit trails are generated, stored, and managed within the sovereign boundary, including automated identity.
- Governed AI inference: AI model deployment and hosting, local GPU clusters, local inference execution and agent operations occur under local governance with traceability and oversight, without exporting data to external providers.
- Ease of deployment: delivering sovereignty at scale with consistency and flexibility, allowing organizations to stand up isolated environments with built-in multitenancy capabilities within a matter of days of deployment; choice of hardware and infrastructure.
“Businesses are facing growing pressure to innovate while meeting tightening regulatory requirements and recognizing the importance of controlling how sensitive data and AI workloads are accessed and operated,” said Priya Srinivasan, General Manager, IBM Software Products. “This shift is creating an urgent need for sovereign solutions that deliver AI-ready environments. With IBM Sovereign Core, we are helping clients move faster and with confidence, combining openness, compliance, and operational autonomy to meet the demands of the AI era, without the need to sacrifice sovereignty requirements.”
Demand for software that addresses the digital sovereignty
Demand for software that addresses the digital sovereignty imperative has risen because enterprises now operate at the intersection of geopolitics, regulation, and AI-driven scale. Governments worldwide increasingly mandate where data resides, who can access it and how algorithms are governed.
At the same time, AI workloads amplify data sensitivity, audit risk and cross-border exposure. Sovereignty-aware software restores authority by embedding jurisdictional control, identity, encryption and compliance directly into the technology stack. For regulated industries, this is no longer optional; it is foundational to risk management, trust, national security and sustained digital competitiveness.
IBM Sovereign Core will be available in a technical preview starting in February 2026, with general availability planned for mid-2026.
