Sovereign Compute
Sovereign compute is AI infrastructure where the hardware, network, and operational staff all sit inside a single jurisdiction's legal control — typically dedicated bare-metal servers in a domestically owned and operated data center.
Sovereign compute is a deployment shape, not a cloud region. The distinction matters because public cloud regions, even in-country, are operated by a vendor whose corporate parent is subject to a different jurisdiction's law (most often the United States CLOUD Act).
For ITAR, CUI, and pre-disclosure intellectual property workloads, the buyer's compliance question is not 'where are the servers' but 'whose subpoena can reach the data and whose staff can read it'. Sovereign compute answers both with the same answer.
Backplain's sovereign offering is a dedicated single-tenant Lambda Scaler with 8 NVIDIA L40S GPUs in a SOC 2 Type II Tier 3 colocation facility in Carlsbad, California — owned by Backplain, operated by US persons, with optional air-gap.
An ITAR-compliant AI deployment processes International Traffic in Arms Regulations data on infrastructure that is owned, operated, and physically located inside the United States and accessed only by US persons.
CUI is information the US Government creates or possesses, or that an entity creates or possesses for the Government, that requires safeguarding consistent with the law and policies cataloged in 32 CFR Part 2002.
BYO cloud is a deployment model where a SaaS vendor's software runs inside the customer's own cloud account — typically AWS, Azure, or GCP — rather than in the vendor's tenancy.