Sovereign clouds: enhanced data security with confidential computing

Enterprises pursuing digital sovereignty must go beyond data residency to protect data in all states, including during computation. Confidential computing uses hardware-level Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to encrypt data while it is being processed, preventing even hypervisors and privileged administrators from accessing it. This shifts cloud security from identity-based trust to state-based, cryptographically verifiable trust via attestation. The post explains how this applies to sovereign AI workloads, why open source is structurally necessary for meaningful attestation, and how Ubuntu supports confidential computing across public clouds (Azure, AWS, GCP with AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX) and on-premises environments.