The empire never left; it just moved to the cloud.

That’s the subtext of Vivek Raghavan’s latest warning. The Sarvam AI co-founder is out here beating a drum that’s getting louder across the Global South: "Sovereign AI." It sounds noble. It sounds patriotic. It sounds like something a government official would tattoo on their bicep before signing a billion-dollar procurement order. Raghavan’s pitch is simple: if India doesn’t build its own intelligence stack, it’s just another digital colony paying rent to landlords in Redmond and Mountain View.

He’s right, of course. He’s also staring down the barrel of a very expensive reality.

The term "digital colony" isn’t just flair. It’s a description of the current plumbing. Right now, if an Indian startup wants to build an app that summarizes legal documents in Kannada, they aren’t using homegrown infrastructure. They’re pinging an API owned by OpenAI or Google. Every query is a tiny micro-tax paid to a US corporation. Every piece of data fed into that model helps refine a brain that India doesn't own, doesn't control, and can’t audit.

It’s the East India Company, but with better UI and significantly more Python code.

Raghavan, who spent years building the digital rails for India’s identity system, Aadhaar, knows how this game works. You don’t win by making the best app. You win by owning the layer everyone else has to stand on. Sarvam AI recently raised $41 million to build this "sovereign" layer. In the world of Large Language Models, $41 million is enough to buy a few rounds of coffee and maybe rent a cluster of H100s for a long weekend. It’s pocket change compared to the $10 billion Microsoft lit on fire to keep Sam Altman in expensive sweaters.

That’s the first friction point. Money.

Building a sovereign AI isn't just about writing clever algorithms. It’s about the silicon. India doesn’t make high-end chips. It buys them from NVIDIA. So, to avoid being a colony of American software, India is currently lining up to become a permanent customer of American hardware. Jensen Huang must love the irony. Every "sovereign" model built in Bengaluru represents a massive transfer of wealth to a company in Santa Clara. We’re swapping one dependency for another and calling it independence.

Then there’s the data problem. The internet is mostly English. The models are mostly English. When you try to force-feed an LLM the linguistic nuances of 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, the math breaks. It’s not just about translation. It’s about context. A model trained on Reddit threads doesn’t understand the specific social friction of a village council in Bihar. Raghavan wants to fix this by building models from the ground up on Indian data.

But data isn't some natural resource you just dig out of the ground. It has to be cleaned, labeled, and curated. That costs lives and hours. Usually, it involves thousands of low-paid workers clicking buttons in a room to tell a machine what a stop sign looks like. It’s grunt work. It’s messy. And it’s the exact opposite of the shiny, high-tech future the brochures promise.

The trade-off is stark. India could keep using GPT-4. It’s fast. It’s smart. It’s already there. But it’s a black box. You don’t know why it says what it says, and you can’t complain when the price goes up or the service gets throttled because of some geopolitical spat. The alternative—the "sovereign" route—is slower, vastly more expensive, and will likely produce models that aren’t as slick as the stuff coming out of San Francisco for a long time.

It’s a choice between a comfortable cage and a very expensive, very difficult freedom.

Raghavan is betting that the Indian government will see the "colony" label and panic. It’s a smart play. Governments hate being told they aren't in charge. But let’s be real about what’s actually happening here. We’re watching the birth of a new kind of nationalism, one measured in tokens per second and GPU clusters.

Is it possible to be truly sovereign when you’re still using the master’s tools to build your own house? Or is "sovereign AI" just a convenient brand for a new set of local middle-men to take their cut of the cloud?

Silicon Valley is already wired into the wall. You can’t just flip a switch and expect the lights to stay on. Raghavan wants India to build its own power plant, but he’s still buying the turbines from the guys across the ocean.

If the goal is to stop being a colony, someone should probably check if the new flag is just the old one with a different logo.