"Now, with this data, you can actually make products and services for AI, and those services should then be sovereign, should be controlled, deployed and developed locally by local talent for the local population or businesses."

The AI sovereignty push hasn't been driven forward by regulators — at least, not yet, according to Cisco's Gow. Rather, it's come from private companies, which are opening more data centers — facilities containing vast amounts of computing equipment to enable cloud-based AI tools — in Europe, he said.