Why data sovereignty is essential to help businesses prepare for impending AI regulation (www.techradar.com)

The EU AI Act — the first major, comprehensive AI law — will see most of its provisions take effect in August 2026, forcing organizations that deploy AI inside the EU to meet a risk-based regime centered on transparency, verification, human oversight and traceability. As global regulators (EU, China, South Korea, and others) tighten rules and the US debates incentives, businesses face growing compliance complexity: failures in high-risk AI can bring heavy fines, reputational damage and even market exclusion. The article argues that data sovereignty — keeping data subject to local laws and under organizational control — is essential to demonstrate compliance and to reduce operational and privacy risk as rules proliferate. Technically, achieving sovereignty and demonstrable compliance usually means moving beyond generic public models to private AI deployments or trusted private platforms. Key controls include training models only on proprietary data, robust encryption, customer-managed keys, granular access controls, auditability (logging, updatability, data erasure), and on-prem or private-cloud integrations that preserve visibility into data flows and model behavior. Private AI supports GDPR and EU AI Act requirements by limiting third‑party data use and enabling human-in-the-loop governance, while public models can create ambiguity about data use. Early adoption of these governance practices and enterprise-grade guardrails simplifies future audits, lowers breach risk, and lets firms innovate within evolving regulatory boundaries.