Rising Centers of Sovereign AI

[Monty2026: The Infrastructure Race] Pervinder Johar (CEO, Avathon) and Abhishek Shukla (Managing Director & Head of North America, Prosperity7 Ventures, Saudi Aramco) discuss sovereign AI with moderator Keith Strier (SVP, Global AI Markets, AMD). The panel frames sovereign AI not as an industry vertical, but as a question of national control: whether a country truly owns the value chain when intelligence is extracted from its own data and geography. Shukla describes how the Gulf region is converting its energy advantage into an AI moat. Johar, whose company builds physical AI for oil rigs, mining, and defense logistics, explains why these zero-hallucination-tolerance environments differ fundamentally from enterprise LLM deployments.