The New Nuclear Club Isn't Nuclear. It's AI.

Last century, if you wanted a real seat at the global table, you joined the nuclear club. Manhattan Project. Nations racing for a weapon they hoped never to use, but absolutely wanted to have.

Fast forward. Today, the new club isn't about uranium. It's about compute, data, and models.

Call it AI sovereignty, digital power, strategic autonomy, but the logic is the same: If you don't control the core technology, you don't control your future.

Look around. Almost every major consumer digital brand people touch daily? American. Most hyperscale cloud & foundation models? US and China.

Europe has serious GDP, talent, fantastic infrastructure companies like Ericsson, Nokia, industrial automation. But in the AI club, the question is harsher: Where are you in the value chain?

Chips? Cloud? Rare minerals? Energy? Do you have your own LLMs you can really govern? Or are you handing national decision-support to a third-party API?

Same for countries outside the US/EU/China triangle. If your strategy is "consume platforms, regulate a bit, hope for the best", you're not a player, you're a market.

The New Manhaten Club

AI sovereignty is not a press release. It's a stack:

1️⃣ Energy & Compute: Can you power and run serious models at home or in trusted infrastructure?

2️⃣ Data: Do you own your flywheel, or just training someone else's model for free?

3️⃣ Models: Can you adapt, fine-tune, govern them to your culture and laws?

4️⃣ Talent & Governance: Do you have people who understand this deeply enough to say "no"?

Because if you don't, you're outsourcing not just IT, you're outsourcing your judgment.

Here's the uncomfortable question for leaders and policymakers:

In the AI era, are you building your own "Manhattan Project" for peaceful intelligence... or waiting to be told what the model thinks about your own country?

Players build. Markets consume. Choose your side.