Latest / Technology Now / What does sovereignty actually mean?
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- SANA KHAREGANI Who am I defining sovereignty for? Because it's a jargon word. that means lots of things to lots of different people to some people it's about resilience. To some people it's about control. To some people it's about partnerships. to some people it's about the, residency of your data. But for me, I think that the definition is much more dependent on the challenges you're trying to solve. MICHAEL BIRD That was a clip from our guest Sana Kharegani from Carbon 3 Dot AI, who recently joined me for a conversation about Data sovereignty and AI. SAM JARRELL It’s an interesting question that Sana raises, right? We use these terms all the time but they absolutely have multiple meanings. MICHAEL BIRD Oh yeah, they absolutely do but I’m hoping when we hear that clip again later in the show the context it gives to the discussion will be really useful. SAM JARRELL In which case, why don't we get rolling? MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. Let's do it Sam. I'm Michael Bird, SAM JARRELL I'm Sam Jarrell And welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD So Sam, as you heard in the earlier clip, even within the technology sector, words can have a lot of different meanings to, well, a lot of different people SAM JARRELL Yeah, it's, it's not really very ideal, is it? I could see that leading to like a few communication issues in the long run. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, absolutely. And, and when it comes to regulation, knowing what things like say data sovereignty mean to a regulator compared to what you might assume it means to someone else, can be the difference between smooth sailing as a company or being fined millions of dollars . And this is particularly important when you are working across multiple countries like we do here, HPE, because you need to make sure you are compliant with every country you work in. So to dig even deeper into the question of what sovereignty is, as well as some other terms, which are somewhat. Eh, loosely defined. I spoke with Sana Kharegani. Now Sana is the former head of the UK government Office for Artificial Intelligence, and she's now the Chief Strategy Officer at Carbon Three dot AI, and we'll find a bit more about them later on in the show. SAM JARRELL That's right. She sounds very, very cool. But before we talk to Sana, I want to dive a little bit into the history of regulation and cloud and why it's such a hot button issue at the moment. So it's time for technology then SAM JARRELL So back in the day, you knew where your data was stored, right? It would be in a server room, probably in a basement, maybe of your office building, that sort of thing. You knew where your data was, you knew how it was protected, and you knew the rules and regulations, which had to be applied to it. But then came cloud computing and things began to change pretty rapidly. While cloud computing has only been in the public eye for a relatively short amount of time. The building blocks have been around since the advent of modern computing, stretching all the way back to researchers in Massachusetts in the early sixties, who created the first computer, which could be used by multiple people simultaneously. . By the turn of the Millennium, cloud computing had evolved and started to catch on with public and private clouds popping up during the two thousands. But here's where problems start to arise. Michael, you live in the United Kingdom. MICHAEL BIRD I do… SAM JARRELL So let's say you're using a cloud provided by a company here in the United States where I am. Where is your data being stored? MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. Um, well, I suppose it depends what the company, who the company is. Um, it depends, I guess, how big they are. I mean, do they have servers here in the UK? Maybe it'll be somewhere in Europe. I, guess it's a bit of a, it depends sort of answer to that question. SAM JARRELL Yeah, the, the, it depends. That's kind of the problem, right? Your data could be created in the uk but be transmitted and processed and stored in multiple other countries, the US or wherever else, all which have their own rules and regulations . So how do you get around this issue? MICHAEL BIRD Uh, I mean, I suppose you either just store it all yourself on premise, or you maybe there's some sort of worldwide regulation or something. I dunno. It's, a tricky one, isn't it? SAM JARRELL Yeah, well, in the case of the European Union, you pass one of the toughest data privacy laws in the world. Um, you're probably familiar with it. I know that I am the general data Protection Regulation more commonly known today as GDPR. These rules have to be followed by any company which has data related to people within the EU, no matter where the company itself is based. And as of this year, one major cloud provider has created a data boundary around the EU. And the European Free Trade Association, this boundary would keep everything internal from the files themselves and business information to even the metadata associated with the company's actions. This boundary allows organizations within it to know exactly where their data is stored and the regulations surrounding it. MICHAEL BIRD And, which is quite fascinating, I think. and it's quite an interesting idea, isn't it? Because I think like data always feels like it's quite, I mean, yeah, you, when you store it somewhere, but it feels like it's quite a fluid thing. Data you sort of never really know where it resides anyway, the regulatory side of cloud is genuinely fascinating. So to find out more, I spoke with Sana Kharegani, the Chief Strategy Officer at Carbon three dot ai, and she started off by telling me who Carbon Three are, and maybe importantly what they do. SANA KHAREGANI Yeah, so Carbon three, we own, we develop and we operate renewable powered AI infrastructure across the uk. Yeah. By converting legacy Industrial and energy sites into modern data center facilities, So rather than greenfield, we're taking old industrial sites and we call that Brownfield. And we combine that with renewable power to deliver resilience, scalable compute capacity for our clients, which sit across healthcare, research, finance, banking, enterprise, the public sector, you be it. we're bringing something totally new to the market. We own our own land and our power and we are fully under UK jurisdiction. we're building better British infrastructure that is affordable. Renewable and resilient from the ground up and by design. MICHAEL BIRD when you say renewable and you say, sort of own the infrastructure, what does that mean? So do, do you own the energy generation? SANA KHAREGANI That's it. We do. it's energy generation that is additional to grid power. We have, an energy waste company that is creating energy from landfills that we then capture the gases and translate them into electrical energy that we can either sell to the grid or to use to power our own data center. And, son I wanna talk sovereignty, if I may, MICHAEL BIRD maybe just doing a quick definition, like what does sovereignty mean in today's context? Because. sovereignty as it relates to AI, as it relates to storage, as it relates to cloud is something that is basically now always being talked about. SANA KHAREGANI yeah, actually ask you the question of to whom, who am I defining sovereignty for? Because it's a jargon word. that means lots of things to lots of different people to some people it's about resilience. To some people it's about control. To some people it's about partnerships. to some people it's about the, residency of your data. But for me, I think that the definition is much more dependent on the challenges you're trying to solve. So if you are, working for government and you are talking about health data of your society, you might consider sovereignty as control over your data. So whereas that data housed, how is it used, where does it go? who has access to it? What, what sort of security sits around it? all of those things might become very, very relevant. Now if you , trying to, break down cardboard boxes, and you have data about what a box looks like and how to identify whether or not a box is recyclable or not, you might not care whether that data is sitting on premise in your country with all of the. The controls that you would on your health data, the situation and the, the application that you're talking about, the, the customer, the sector, all of these things make, make a difference in the definition of sovereignty. Now, even when you're breaking down cardboard boxes, you might want to have the, you know, that might be a, an application, a software that you've created, that you have IP over. And so you have sovereign control, you have control over that. This is why I'm saying that the definition changes completely depending on context. MICHAEL BIRD how does the UK differ to other countries and other jurisdictions as it relates to sovereignty? And, and maybe to focus in on, data. I think with the rise of cloud, that was certainly a conversation, which was, where does my data reside? And certainly there were certain regulations at that point. I, I mean, is it just sort of a rehash of that conversation? SANA KHAREGANI Yeah, it's such a good question. And, that's a really good way of thinking about kind of the evolution of, some of these technologies, and how far we've come because, a number of years ago when the government was creating government digital service, we didn't call it data sovereignty at the time, but, that's basically what it was. government had a, had very strict rules about where government specific data sat. and it had to stay. We didn't want, government data to go offshore and,go all the way to, to Seattle, Washington and, sit over there. Now the conversation's very different now when we are talking about sovereignty. We are going much deeper than where our data system we're asking ourselves whether actually. Even having the, the data on, UK soil, is that enough? That's the evolution of becoming, smarter customers of these technologies. And that's exactly what we want, right? We want to be getting into that level of thinking. We wanna be thinking about what we actually need to provide the best services from a government perspective. We need to be thinking how do we provide the best service? To our citizens, how do we as an elected government, service our electorate? And so as we become better consumers of these technologies, whether we are, government or enterprise or whatever, we will have more of a handle on what types of solutions there are and define the solution that we actually want. And what Carbon Three is doing is putting that provision out saying "you don't have to make these kinds of compromises. You can choose to do things differently. You can choose to have, compute that is being delivered under UK jurisdiction MICHAEL BIRD is what Carbon three AI are doing? is it unique? Are there, are there organizations doing the exact same thing? SANA KHAREGANI what we are doing, which is unique, is that we are not foregoing parts of the, chain of responsibility in order to deliver an outcome that we want. we care about the sustainability perspective. we absolutely want to be able to provide services, to our clients that, provide the resilience and the jurisdiction that we're looking for, but also in a way that are sustainable using renewable energy at costs that are not crazy. So they are, comparative, competitive costing structures. we also deeply care about the regeneration aspects of this, we're taking, brownfield sites that were the pinnacle of the industrial revolution for the uk and we're bringing them into the future, into the digital age. These are sites that are left behind that are not being used. We want to build on these kinds of sites and we want to work with the communities to ensure that these data centers are doing right by them as well. So we care about that kind of regeneration skills, job creation aspect. and I think that's really important to ensure that these become solutions that are lasting. MICHAEL BIRD what does a data center bring to a community? I'm just genuinely interested. SANA KHAREGANI so a data center is,what looks like a little one story, sometimes very big one acre, one story factory, right? So you've got jobs that are created in building that a center. You've got jobs that are created in running a data center, but those are not. not Interesting, right. What a data center brings is a hub of compute to a region. It brings inward investment, it brings, the ability to set up ancillary companies and jobs and, and an ecosystem around it where people come to, create companies or, or science parks or it Fuels the, the next generation's research programs. it's those kind of ecosystems that are built around at a center that are really important. But also, one other thing is that we at Carbon three are looking at, liquid cooled data centers, which means that, which gives us the opportunity to capture a hundred percent of the heat that's generated from these data centers. And we can look to use that heat to, for example, heat homes, around. Where the data centers are placed, MICHAEL BIRD Right, because resilience aside the thought process could be, well, you just build one massive data center in the middle of the uk, and that just serves everyone for everything. But what you're saying is actually, if you can create slightly smaller nodes dotted around the country. Firstly, if you're running AI workloads, you need to be quite close to those data centers to be able to pump it with data or, you know, the things that you want to do, but also it, you can create opportunities around those data centers SANA KHAREGANI I mean that, and I think just building one massive data center, I'm not sure where you're gonna put that and also it gives you, quite an easy way to take down the entire backbone all our AI applications for the uk. So, I mean, it's a great idea. Why don't you try that? MICHAEL BIRD but I, I mean, distributed infrastructure it's a thing that as, as countries we've been doing for years, distributed, distributed infrastructure. SANA KHAREGANI And that's, the data centers are now classed as national critical infrastructure. I think that's a really important thing for us to, to think about. we're building, the railroads or the roads or the, the pylons, the electrical network of the future, right? we have to do that in a way that's resilient and in a way that, strong enough, but it's also built for other applications to be built on top of. MICHAEL BIRD alright, we talk sovereignty and we talked about the issues with the word sovereignty. Artificial intelligence… do we see an issue with the term artificial intelligence too? SANA KHAREGANI Yeah, I mean, I do, I think it's a, it's a massively overloaded,and overused term that, that just causes confusion. if you talk to scientists, they'll tell you that we basically call artificial intelligence everything we haven't figured out yet. And once we figure something out. It then just gets its application name, right? And I, I often try and just get people to talk about what is it that we're thinking about out. MICHAEL BIRD because I think people talk about the goal of ai, but Sometimes feels like there is really a goal. this big AI boom. You know what, what is the end goal at the moment? SANA KHAREGANI I mean I think that's, it's, it's an incredibly interesting question, right? I think, um. and again, it depends on who we're talking about, right? Because there is now work around AI for science, right? And and there's definitely a boom around that. Lots of money going into that. And science, for example, lends itself incredibly well to artificial intelligence because it's got lots of rules. And AI loves rules, right? We also have this current view that if the, the more data and the more compute we throw at learning algorithms, or large language models, then the smarter the intelligence becomes. but there's a real question around, whether that's true. and to your point, what is it that we are striving to get to? if we're not thinking about sustainability as we, we go towards this goal, who's gonna be there to enjoy it? MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. It sort of feels like maybe we're striving towards a goal that we don't quite understand. SANA KHAREGANI I guess someone must understand it if they're, if they're getting there. I, but it does feel a little bit like we are racing towards something, undefined. And my wish is that we address challenges that we know about. and we drive towards solving those challenges. And we've got some big ones, right? There's sustainable development goals. we still have hunger and, water doesn't get everywhere it needs to in the time, but, but a package, that gets delivered within 24 hours, right? So I do question whether We are driving towards answers that actually help humans MICHAEL BIRD very good point. I, I think I, I think I probably agree with you on that. How should our organizations be adapting to a world where at least the terminology sovereignty is becoming increasingly important and it's is becoming increasingly something that our organizations are sort of having to think about, where it maybe wasn't something that we were having to think about 10 years ago, at least didn't feel like we had to think about it. SANA KHAREGANI my advice is for any organization, you know, whether they are, in the public sector, in the private sector, or across the board is to think about the challenges that they're facing, what are the challenges, that you're trying to address with the technology that, you have, in your gift to use? It's like, well, actually, well, why don't we just kind of step back for a minute and say, what is our challenge? Right? Do we actually need AI? do we need technology to solve it? What kind of technology do we need? Right? And is, is that technology AI? But I think it needs to start there. We have to say, Where is our data coming from? What does our data look like? what's the level of importance of this data? It's really, really tough. And I think, it's a tough question and I'm what I'm saying, and I'm not trying to trivialize the steps that organizations have to go through, but I also think that organizations don't give themselves enough credit. They look outward and. assume they have to do certain things and move really fast. And I think if they take a step and remember that they're the owners of the challenge and they're the experts in their field, that they can address this in a much more pragmatic way. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. And I, I, I, I've, um, I, I remember somebody once telling me, you know, as, as it relates to ai, sometimes AI is a, a solution looking for a problem. If, if, if as an organization you just say, we want to do an ai. It's like, yeah, but what for? SANA KHAREGANI Yeah, you know, there's lots of different ways that people are using AI and I, and for me it goes through phases. you can think about, tech companies that started in, in one space, for example, they started selling books, and they moved into delivering and produce. as a online grocer, we wouldn't have assumed that a book retailer would be, one of our competitors. But that's the world we live in. that's the world that these technologies unlock, and we need to be on a journey to get there. SAM JARRELL Wow. Well, for me that, that was a fascinating interview. I really appreciated that. Sana and Carbon three focus a lot on the renewable side of all of this to me, I feel like AI data centers are starting to get a little bit of a bad wrap sometimes. Um, particularly because of their environmental impacts. And so learning about some of the things that they're doing to actually like renew, I think she called them brown sites, Using the heat to power homes and just do things that are actually positive to the communities that they're in it. That made me quite happy. MICHAEL BIRD I think it was a really interesting concept, because yeah, I mean we, we are now in the sort of post AI world. AI is here, it's not going away. it's so integrated into how we do things. Organizations will be using AI to do things, and so. the infrastructure has to be there. And what I was really interested in, was like the fact that is about creating these little hubs dotted around,And, and they actually, to your point, the impact it can have on the community from a, business perspective of, you know, it is a hub that other businesses will appear around these data centers who want 'em to be using that as a service. it sort of becomes a bit of like a, local resource plus then the heat could be used for useful things like heating homes or heating a swimming pool. I think very naively, I just thought, well, you know, just build one hulking great big data center in the middle of the country. She laughed at me. Fair enough. SAM JARRELL I see your thought on having the singular sort of data center, but I also definitely agree with her in that that becomes then a target, right? For maybe some nefarious folks that wanna take down the entire thing, all your eggs in one basket. Don't put all your AI in one data center. MICHAEL BIRD Don't put all your a one data, one data center. Exactly. Um, yeah. Um, but yes. And then, and then talking about sovereignty, I thought it was really interesting that actually she sort of pushed back on a definition. SAM JARRELL Yeah, she raises some really good sort of philosophical points around it of like, it depends MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, that's it, isn't it? SAM JARRELL what you're trying to solve. it made me think of, our. AI ethics principles that we debuted back in like 2022, as all of this was really starting to kick off. But essentially that like in order to have AI, your data and the AI that uses it has to be like privacy enabled and secure, human focused, inclusive, robust, and responsible, and like. It means that your eventually data kind of functions like currency really, and it needs to kind of have a governing structure around it. And it has inherent intrinsic value. And I think people are starting to realize that more and more that like back in the day, you just kind of ticked a box and like, yeah, you could have access to my data. I don't really care what happens with it. And now people are taking their data more and more seriously as it's being used by these systems. MICHAEL BIRD I remember when GDPR, came out and it was a bit like a. Goodness sake. Ugh. Like we have to really think, oh, such a faff. But I sort of understand now that actually, back in the day it was just like sort of protecting customer data, which is important, But nowadays you're right, like data is currency. So Thinking about the, sort of importance of data to an organization. I mean, Sana about actually how actually as us as citizens, like our data and the fact that actually citizens wouldn't want their data used in particular ways. And so actually being, being sure about where our data is. Being used and being stored and all that sort of stuff is really important. SAM JARRELL The last thing that I wanna talk about though for this is, I loved the line that you brought up where I think you said AI is sometimes a solution looking for a problem, and I absolutely agree with that. It kind of reminds me of like when cloud first came out and everyone wanted to put all their data in the cloud and it was cloud this for everything, but it was a bit of like a hotel California situation that people realized later where it's like you can check in all of your data here, but it is a lot harder to check it out. And it's everyone kind of figuring out what is the actual application of this. MICHAEL BIRD Now, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times already, Sana worked for the UK government and We talked about it briefly in the interview but I really wanted to dig down a bit into what governments are currently thinking about when it comes to the ongoing AI boom, and what else are they having to consider when making decisions about AI? SANA KHAREGANI I think governments right now are thinking about how they deliver better products and services to their citizens. They're also thinking about how they can make themselves more productive in the way that they run as a government. And so you have to think about your entire end-to-end landscape and you have to, um, think about the technology that you provide in a way that matches the challenge you're trying to solve. And some parts of that portfolio need. Critical, resilient, secure offerings that are very much under the jurisdiction and control of the government and other parts don't. and every government, not just the UK will want to have the opportunity to choose partners and options across that entire landscape. and what Carbon Three is, doing is providing options within that, for the UK government and across the sectors that the UK has. MICHAEL BIRD Now, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times already, Sana worked for the UK government and We talked about it briefly in the interview but I really wanted to dig down a bit into what governments are currently thinking about when it comes to the ongoing AI boom, and what else are they having to consider when making decisions about AI? SANA KHAREGANI I think governments right now are thinking about how they deliver better products and services to their citizens. They're also thinking about how they can make themselves more productive in the way that they run as a government. And so you have to think about your entire end-to-end landscape and you have to, um, think about the technology that you provide in a way that matches the challenge you're trying to solve. And some parts of that portfolio need. Critical, resilient, secure offerings that are very much under the jurisdiction and control of the government and other parts don't. and every government, not just the UK will want to have the opportunity to choose partners and options across that entire landscape. and what Carbon Three is, doing is providing options within that, for the UK government and across the sectors that the UK has. MUSIC STING SAM JARRELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Sana Kharegani, And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com Subject line Michael? MICHAEL BIRD Uh, national critical infrastructure SAM JARRELL and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Christopher Allen, Alissa Mitry and Renee Edwards. SAM JARRELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!