G42 has presented its Digital Embassies framework and Greenshield on Tuesday, a new operating model of sovereignty that allows countries to establish artificial intelligence in a safe and scalable manner without compromising their legal authority and control over their data, systems, and policies, no matter where infrastructure is hosted.
As governments speed up the adoption of AI in public service, national security, healthcare, energy, and industry, a significant disparity between ambition and infrastructural preparedness is increasingly apparent.
Domestic sovereign cloud and data center deployments may require years to implement, and legal, regulatory, and security requirements are enforced immediately. The Digital Embassies and Greenshield are developed to bridge that gap.
Digital Embassies and Greenshield treat sovereignty like a flag that travels with a workload, like a diplomatic mission carries legal authority beyond borders. This notion renders jurisdiction portable and enforceable over agreed Digital Embassy spaces, rather than being constrained by physical location.
However, this enables governments to use AI today without having to tie themselves into irreversible, inflexible infrastructure choices.
H.E. Omran Sharaf, Assistant Foreign Minister for Advanced Science and Technology, said, “Our vision is that every government, regardless of size or geography, can operationalize its digital and AI strategy with full sovereign control over its data, systems, and policies, from day one. Digital Embassies and Greenshield define a new era of governance where law and infrastructure are not in tension, but in alignment, enabling trusted AI at scale, even when infrastructure is hosted across borders.”
Chief Commercial Officer of G42 International, Ali Al Amine, added, “Governments are clear on their sovereignty responsibilities, but they need practical ways to deploy AI today. Digital Embassies and Greenshield provide that path. They allow nations to enforce their laws and policies from day one, while preserving flexibility over how and where infrastructure evolves over time.”
The Digital Embassies model creates upfront government-to-government legal structures that stipulate jurisdiction, authority, and sovereign rights.
These frameworks make sure that data and systems are subject to national laws, even when the infrastructure is hosted or run outside the physical borders of a country.
Greenshield is an operational layer deployed by Core42, the digital infrastructure division of G42, that maps sovereign policy to implementation. It enforces uniform sovereign controls across the environments and applies to identity and access, data handling, security, compliance, auditability, and continuity.
In the case of Greenshield, sovereignty exists even when workloads are migrated between various cloud and infrastructure plans, ensuring that control is maintained as systems grow and change.
Interim CEO of Core42 and Group Chief Global Affairs Officer at G42, Talal Al Kaissi, stated, “Greenshield is implemented through Core42’s heterogeneous AI Cloud, a mesh of sovereign compute and cloud environments already deployed across multiple geographies, including sovereign AI clusters in North America, Europe, and the UAE. When coupled with the government-to-government agreements, Greenshield introduces technical and policy controls that enable governments to run accelerated AI workloads with sovereign controls regardless of where the infrastructure is located.”
G42 has a strategic collaboration with Microsoft that supports the implementation of the framework based on the global cloud platforms and services, where needed.
It also augments existing large-scale infrastructure projects like the 5 GW AI campus of the UAE, whose strategic architecture puts it in a position to cover about half the population in a 3,200 km radius with sub-60 ms latency, which is a crucial sovereign AI backbone that can be used to support Digital Embassies and Greenshield to offer resilient, high-level services to regions.
Therefore, the digital sovereignty used to rely on physical location. The data was regarded as sovereign since it was locally stored and control demanded local infrastructure.
Digital Embassies denote a change: sovereignty is considered as a legal and operational state that can be imposed consistently, despite the increased distributed infrastructure.
This will lessen the risk of massive initial capital expenditure, speed up AI initiatives nationwide, and offer a more robust road to countries that want robust sovereign safeguards without years of infrastructure development taking shape.
The conversations with partner nations currently undergoing acceleration at the World Economic Forum in Davos and beyond, Digital Embassies and Greenshield, based on the Intelligence Grid vision of G42, are becoming the standard form of sovereign AI implementation at the global level, such that intelligence is powerful, secure, and equally accessible wherever states decide to build, compete, and cooperate.
