World Leaders Put Spotlight on Sovereign AI at NVIDIA GTC

March 4, 2025 by Dan Rowinski

Around the world, sovereign AI is enabling countries to build and deploy artificial intelligence capabilities on their own.

This strategic initiative encompasses both physical and data infrastructures, with the latter including sovereign foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs) trained on datasets with a country’s local language, culture and history.

These efforts often take place through public and private partnerships. For example, a government might collaborate with local telecommunication providers to build sovereign AI clouds that benefit their communities. Or higher-education and research institutions might partner with private companies to establish regional hubs that form the backbone of local AI innovation in scientific discovery.

At NVIDIA GTC, a global AI conference taking place March 17-21 in San Jose, California, attendees can explore a series of sessions on how nations, state and local governments, higher education and telecommunications companies are embracing AI factories as critical infrastructure for digital transformation and resilience.

Don’t miss NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote on Tuesday, March 18, at 10 a.m. PT.

Browse the sovereign AI sessions at GTC.

Sovereign AI Summit

The Sovereign AI Summit at GTC will provide a unique opportunity to hear from ministers, policymakers and AI leaders from over 10 nations on their national AI agendas, roadmaps for building out AI factories and best practices in training and deploying sovereign foundation models to transform economies. This event will take place on Thursday, March 20, from 7:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT in the Imperial Ballroom, at Signia by Hilton, in San Jose.

The summit features three sessions:

  • Government Approaches to Advancing Sovereign AI: In this panel discussion, policymakers and government technology leaders from the U.K., Denmark, India and Japan will share how they’re driving their national AI agenda forward.
  • Empower the Ecosystem With Sovereign Foundation Models: This discussion will cover how LLM builders are designing models that incorporate and reflect the language, culture and unique nuances of their nation. Naver Cloud, iGenius, Siam.ai and Wipro will share how they’re advancing the development of AI-powered services.
  • Lessons Learned From Deploying Gen AI Applications: IT leaders from National Informatics Center India, ThinkDeep France and Widelabs Brazil will share insights on deploying generative AI applications using sovereign models and how they improve efficiency for both employees and citizens.

Sovereign AI in Telecommunications

Telecom companies are increasingly playing the role of deploying sovereign AI factories for local governments, enterprises, startups, researchers and students to build generative AI applications. Attend the following sessions to learn how telcos are enabling countries to invest in and manage complex AI infrastructure platforms:

AI Hubs in Higher Education, Research, State and Local Government

State and local governments are partnering with higher-education institutions to build regional AI supercomputer infrastructures that enable scientific breakthroughs, economic growth and technological advancements. Attend these sessions to learn how state and local governments and higher education are building local AI hubs:  

NVIDIA Cloud Partners Advancing Sovereign AI

NVIDIA Cloud Partners (NCPs), members of the NVIDIA Partner Network, offer hosted infrastructure and services to enable diverse AI applications including AI agents, generative AI, industrial digitalization, high-performance computing and data analytics. In collaboration with NVIDIA and local investment partners, regional NCPs are building sovereign AI capabilities on public and private clouds to drive AI innovation.

Learn more at these sessions:

  • Building Generative AI for a Billion Indian Voices: A discussion between Yotta Data Centres and Sarvam AI on building domain-specific generative AI solutions that are voice-first and cost-effective while also addressing key research challenges in building state-of-the-art multilingual automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech models — ensuring that the voice-to-voice generative AI stack delivers real-time performance.
  • Bridging Performance and Flexibility in Network Architecture: Jean-Baptiste Kempf, chief technology officer at Scaleway, will discuss how the ability to change fabric on the fly is a significant challenge for building networking architectures. Learn how to maximize the benefit provided by the flexibility of the architecture and see how simple implementation is for network engineers who are used to Ethernet fabrics.
  • Scale AI and Unlock ROI While Protecting Your IP Using Sustainable High-Performance Computing: Technical leaders from Northern Data Group and Ardent Data Centers will dive into the cutting-edge advancements shaping AI-optimized data centers, from breakthroughs in AI chip design to the revolutionary cooling technologies enabling ultra-high-density compute.

Browse the full catalog of sessions at GTC.

Register now for the conference to explore the latest AI advancements in the public sector.