Julia Carver is a postdoctoral researcher with The Hague Program on International Cyber Security at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. She is currently also completing her DPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford, as the recipient of a UKRI and Nuffield College studentship. Her research explores the interplay between geopolitical strategic thought, sovereignty, and the development of cybersecurity policy by the European Union. At Oxford, Julia taught undergraduate politics as a Special (Stipendiary) Lecturer in Politics for Magdalen College and she held a research position with the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at Oxford’s Departmentof Computer Science. Throughout her time at Oxford, Julia has collaborated with governments on matters of cybersecurity, defence and strategy, and she has conducted fieldwork on governmental responses to large-scale ransomware attacks. She also founded the Cyber Strategy and Information Operations research group (now the Oxford Technology & Security Nexus) affiliated with Oxford's Changing Character of War Centre and Nuffield College. Recently, Julia was a 2024-2025 European Cyber Security Fellow at Virtual Routes.

Strategic competition over cloud computing technologies and sovereignty claims have emerged as key dimensions of global digital politics. While extant literature has tended to overlook the relationship between states' competition over artificial intelligence and their cloud sovereignty ambitions—treating AI competition and cloud sovereignty as siloed issues--they are closely intertwined in reality. Not only are cloud infrastructure and AI technologies key components of Big Tech companies’ ‘technology stacks’, but both technologies have become strategically integrated into contemporary state approaches to ‘digital sovereignty’. Drawing upon the understudied Dutch and British policy contexts as illustrative cases, this paper advances a conceptual framework for understanding how the pursuit of particular ‘sovereign cloud’ solutions by various European states have been shaped by wider techno-geopolitical pressures, including the growing structural entanglement between cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, and states’ foreign policy goals. In so doing, I elaborate an AI-cloud sovereignty paradox in European approaches to digital sovereignty. Accordingly, this paper seeks to offer novel theoretical and empirical contributions to digital IPE scholarship by conceptualizing the ‘integrative’ features of cloud and AI technologies from a geo-economic perspective and by foregrounding the significant tensions  they introduce for states’ digital sovereignty goals.