The Sovereign Illusion
AI, Geopolitics, and Power in an Interdependent World

The Definitive Investigation of Artificial Intelligence, Geopolitics, and Global PowerEvery nation on Earth is pursuing the same intoxicating promise: technological sovereignty. From Washington and Beijing to London, Tokyo, and Riyadh, heads of state pledge hundreds of billions of dollars to build domestic artificial intelligence stacks free from foreign coercion. They declare that in the machine age, true independence requires owning every layer of compute within national borders.That promise is a physical, economic, and geological impossibility.In The Sovereign Illusion, enterprise transformation strategist Victor Brooks deconstructs the planetary machine behind modern AI. Drawing on field investigations, trade data, and physical engineering realities, Brooks demonstrates that frontier AI is not an ethereal cloud algorithm—it is the most complex, specialized, and geographically entangled industrial web in human history.From the high-purity quartz mines of Spruce Pine to the baseload power constraints of national energy grids, and from ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography in Europe to advanced packaging in Taiwan, no single nation can command the entire compute stack alone.If absolute autarky is an illusion, how do nations preserve economic agency and democratic self-determination? Brooks delivers a groundbreaking answer: sovereignty does not require independence; it requires the capacity to act under conditions of inescapable dependence.Through an unsparing analysis of American compute monopolies, China's resilient hardware adaptations, European regulatory statecraft, and the strategic leverage of the Global Majority, The Sovereign Illusion provides an indispensable operational doctrine for policymakers, technology leaders, macro investors, and strategic thinkers navigating power in the twenty-first century.