Late in 2023 Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, began peddling a new idea. Every country, he said, should have its own artificial-intelligence (AI) system, trained on domestic data, aligned with national values and built using local infrastructure. Appealing to policymakers’ fondness for manufacturing, the boss of the chip colossus described these systems as “AI factories”, ingesting data and churning out intelligence. He called it “sovereign AI”.