Please introduce yourself and tell us about Civo
I’m Mark Boost, CEO and co-founder of Civo – a Sovereign Cloud and AI platform. I’ve spent my career in tech pushing for a cloud industry that’s actually open, fair, and transparent – which is also why I was a founding executive committee member of the Open Cloud Coalition.
We built Civo to challenge the traditional cloud model and put control back in the hands of users; we wanted to give developers and businesses a real alternative. Simply put, Civo is designed to give you the speed and flexibility of the public cloud, but with the data control, privacy, and honest pricing you’d expect from private infrastructure.
What defines true data sovereignty, and how can nations avoid losing digital control?
Sovereignty is about jurisdictional control, rather than where a data centre is based. For example, even if your data is stored in the UK, if it’s held by a US provider, it can be accessed by US authorities under the US CLOUD Act. This means it’s never truly sovereign. While open source doesn’t implicitly deliver sovereignty on its own, adhering to open standards and open architectures can help with this. It can ensure nations don’t rely on entirely locked-down proprietary systems with zero portability or interoperability. The UK can’t deliver meaningful sovereign action without treating open source as a strategic national asset.
That’s because, on top of jurisdictional overreach and black-box stacks, these closed-loop environments also entrench platform lock-in. Moving to another provider becomes technically difficult and prohibitively expensive, thereby reducing digital autonomy. Without the ability to move, you are effectively ceding long-term control to a foreign nation.
Why is relying on US hyperscalers a mistake for the UK’s AI ambitions?
Three foreign-owned hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft, and Google – control up to 90% of the UK cloud market. If the UK is to be an AI leader, it must shift from a reactive to a proactive position. In addition to purchasing a balanced portfolio of cloud services, the government must strategically invest in a robust, UK-based ecosystem for data, cloud and AI resources. This will ensure domestic retention of critical computing resources while benefiting the British technology ecosystem through the availability of domestically produced, regulated computing power.
Building our domestic innovation on the backs of the Big Three US hyperscalers takes high-skilled jobs and intellectual property out of the UK. Treating compute and data as a strategic asset, much like our national grid, would create a framework of co-investment and R&D incentives, establishing innovative businesses that can withstand geopolitical headwinds.
How might sovereignty-driven cloud models shape the future of digital infrastructure, particularly in highly regulated industries?
Sovereignty-driven cloud models will shift digital infrastructure away from a single-cloud mindset. Organisations in highly regulated industries will no longer default to just one large provider. Instead, they will adopt a more deliberate approach, where each workload runs based on sensitivity, jurisdiction and risk.
This will drive demand for environments that offer continuity across sovereign, private and public clouds. These systems must allow workloads to move easily as requirements change.
Infrastructure will continue to become more policy-aware. Data residency, regulation and geopolitical risk will now actively shape how systems are designed.
This shift will accelerate the move towards sovereign and locally controlled infrastructure. As a result, organisations will reduce their over-reliance on a small number of global providers. Hyperscalers will remain part of the mix but will no longer be the only option.
AI is amplifying these trends. As organisations deploy more data-sensitive and compute-intensive workloads, control, location and governance become central concerns.
This will force organisations to strongly consider where their AI runs and evaluate the sovereignty-tax trade-offs, balancing the immediate cost efficiencies of the public cloud against the long-term strategic necessity of data ownership and regulatory resilience.
