Is datacentre sovereignty really that important?

In the UK (and I'm sure elsewhere) politicians and commentators are falling over themselves to suggest that without huge fleets of datacentres built in the UK that we are going to be hopelessly left behind. I'm not convinced this is the case, and it risks really falling into the same (mostly misguided) obsession many politicians have for heavy industry revival. This is going to be a rare UK-centric post on my blog. Apologies for my mostly global readership; the argument may be different where you live. Latency isn't a big deal One of the first (and most easily dismissed) arguments I've heard is that without datacentres close to the users, the latency will be too high to use AI services. This would therefore make them too slow to use. Clearly, this isn't the case. Nearly all AI use cases are not hugely latency sensitive. To put this in context, the time to first token (how quickly the AI responds) on Opus models is between 1.6s and 3.6s. The round trip latency introduced from the UK to…