A March 2026 Foreign Policy opinion piece by Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director at the World Economic Forum, argues that national "AI sovereignty" — the ambition for a country to own and control a complete end-to-end AI technology stack — is a costly strategic miscalculation. Writing for Foreign Policy's Argument section, Jurgens uses TSMC's Arizona fabrication facility as his central case study: despite nearly $12 billion in US investment to reshore advanced chip production, the Arizona fabs are projected to remain a full generation behind TSMC's Taiwan operations once fully online. His conclusion is pointed — you can move a factory, but you cannot move the accumulated knowledge and manufacturing expertise that makes it competitive.
The piece maps the depth of interdependency underlying modern AI infrastructure. Advanced chip production requires Dutch extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASML, which itself depends on German precision optics from Zeiss and laser systems from Trumpf; Taiwanese fabrication expertise; US-designed GPU architectures from Nvidia; and high-bandwidth memory from South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix. No single nation sits atop all of these nodes simultaneously. Jurgens notes that governments globally are projected to spend over $1 trillion by 2030 chasing sovereign AI stacks, yet even China's roughly $150 billion domestic semiconductor push has failed to close the critical gap in advanced EUV lithography — the bottleneck that gates leading-edge chip production.
Rather than full-stack autarky, Jurgens advocates for what he terms "strategic autonomy" — a more targeted policy posture focused on securing leverage at specific choke points in the supply chain rather than attempting to replicate every layer domestically. For AI policy practitioners, the distinction matters: it implies prioritizing investments in chip architecture IP, electronic design automation software, or key materials where a nation's leverage is highest, rather than funding costly duplication of capabilities that already exist elsewhere in allied networks.
Washington has already committed $52 billion under the CHIPS Act and layered on export controls cutting China off from advanced EUV tooling — spending heavily on what amounts to strategic autonomy, without calling it that. If Jurgens is right, the Arizona fab isn't a down payment on sovereignty. It's an expensive proof that the concept was wrong from the start.