Invest in - "sovereign AI".
As the US keeps tightening export controls on advanced AI chips, technology and recently new frontier models (Fable 5), governments outside the US are realizing they can't depend on AI they don't control.
So they're racing to build their own. That means their own chips, data centers, and models, on their own soil. That's "sovereign AI," and it's become one of the biggest spending trends in tech.
1. The EU is going all in. Through its InvestAI plan, the EU committed €20 billion to build AI gigafactories, each with around 100,000 AI chips, to train Europe's own very large models instead of relying on US companies. They even have a Commissioner for Tech Sovereignty. The whole goal is for Europe to stand on its own as an "AI continent."
2. Australia too. Its National AI Plan pushes sovereign capability, meaning Australian data on Australian controlled infrastructure. Data center investment there is forecast to reach about AU$26 billion by 2030, and giants are piling in, with Microsoft investing A$25 billion and AWS A$20 billion to build local capacity. The same story is forming across the Middle East, India, and Japan.
3. So how does a beginner actually invest in this? The key insight: you don't need to guess which AI model wins. You invest in the "picks and shovels," the companies that build the chips, data centers, and power that every sovereign AI project runs on. They get paid regardless of whose model wins.
4. The simplest, lower risk way is an ETF. Instead of betting on one company, an ETF holds a whole basket.
For this theme, something like the Global X Data Center & Digital Infrastructure ETF $DTCR, which holds data center operators and digital infrastructure names, packages it into one ticker.
VanEck also just launched a data center supply chain ETF $RACK. This is usually the smartest starting point for a beginner.
5. If you want individual names (higher risk, higher reward), think in layers. For chips, there's Nvidia $NVDA, which sells the GPUs to nearly everyone, including the EU, since it has no chip production of its own yet. For the data center and "neocloud" layer, there's the big 3, $IREN Nebius $NBIS, and CoreWeave $CRWV, which build and rent out the actual compute.
6. Why IREN stands out on the sovereign angle.
It has power and data centers across the US, Europe (Spain), and Asia Pacific, the exact regions building sovereign AI. And its recent Mirantis acquisition added the software and Kubernetes orchestration layer that turns raw GPUs into a complete, standalone AI cloud a government or bank can run on its own terms.
> Hardware plus software plus global footprint.
NFA. DYOR.