Nations are racing to secure their own AI infrastructure.

But the gap between ambition and execution is measured in megawatts, GPU clusters, and years of operational know-how.

Craig Tavares, President and COO of BUZZ HPC, has spent two decades building digital infrastructure across telecom, cloud, and energy, from Cogeco's global datacenters to Apple's cloud architecture to co-founding one of North America's first HPC facilities connected directly to a power plant.

Now he leads BUZZ HPC, one of Canada's largest sovereign AI cloud platforms and an NVIDIA Cloud Partner operating GPU clusters across Canada, the Nordics, and South America.

In this keynote from the 2025 RAISE Summit in Paris, Craig breaks down what sovereign AI actually requires to build, why most nations are underestimating the infrastructure challenge, and what operators on the ground are learning as the global contest for compute accelerates.