Max Buchan started advocating for infrastructure sovereignty when, as he puts it, “globalization and Davos were still cool.”
He felt that Western governments were quietly handing the keys to their most sensitive operations to American tech giants—and would eventually lose the ability to control what their own intelligence and infrastructure ran on. Most enterprises, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, had three cloud servers—U.S., Europe, Asia—and nobody called it a vulnerability. Buchan, 24 at the time and fresh off helping take a fintech company from zero to a unicorn (which later listed on the Nasdaq at $1.2 billion), thought it was going to be catastrophic.
