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by imdsm 38 days ago
Marketing aside, why are you using the term "UK sovereign"?

I assume UK based DCs, so why not just say that, UK based LLM inference.

Is it a DC owned/ran by HM Gov? Is that why it's sovereign?

Not a criticism, more of a critique.

3 comments

Much the same way the word "patriotism" is more common in US national discourse, "sovereignty" is very common in UK national discourse.
You're thinking of when chavs used to wear sovereign rings... it's fell out of fashion now tbh
Data Sovereignty as a term is now fairly well established term that doesn't have specific government connotations e.g. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-eu...
He does say that? "running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK" is in there and that's pretty unambiguous.
The problem is if those GPUs are running on an AWS server (or any other American provider), even if it the server is in the UK the sovereignty claim is null and void.
Civo isn’t a US company and isn’t a subsidiary of one. UK-incorporated since 2018, UK-resident leadership, no US parent, entirely UK founder owned. We also share the concern on the Azure/AWS “sovereign cloud”, but this doesn't apply here. The CLOUD Act reaches data held by US entities regardless of where the servers sit, which is exactly why those offerings are problematic. We’re outside that jurisdiction by corporate structure, not just geography.
Doesn't "We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction" cover that?
In theory it should, but I've seen that language describing Azure "sovereign cloud" servers before. The data might indeed be stored in the UK, the problem is the CLOUD act which supersedes it.