Step 01
Start with the guide
SDIS-00 sets the purpose, terminology, citation rules and the registry of identifiers used across the series.
Research
The science behind sovereign intelligence.
A complete technical series on the systems, silicon and policy that make national AI independence possible — twelve reports and a series guide, each with a persistent DOI on Zenodo.
12
Technical reports
01
Series guide
4
Architecture planes
DOI
Persistent identifiers
The series
A reference architecture for national digital infrastructure.
The Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (SDIS) is D-AI's open technical corpus — twelve reports plus a series guide by Bijan Burnard, published with persistent identifiers on Zenodo.
Together they define how a nation keeps control of data, compute, operations and governance: sovereign cloud, residency, identity, semiconductors, standards, resilience, cybersecurity, financial rails and public-sector procurement.
View the D-AI Research community on ZenodoHow to read
Three steps through the series.
Start with the registry, work through each layer, then use the capstone as the operating architecture.
Step 02
Read the twelve reports
Each paper covers one layer of national digital infrastructure — from cloud and data to identity, compute, security and procurement.
Step 03
Close with the stack
SDIS-12 synthesizes the series into a single reference architecture and a maturity roadmap for institutions building from a low baseline.
Start here
Series guide and publication registry.
SDIS-00 is the index for the twelve technical reports — methodology, terminology, versioning and the DOI registry.
SDIS 00
Series Guide and Publication Registry
SDIS-00 accompanies the twelve technical reports of the Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series. It states the purpose and scope of the series, documents the research methodology and core terminology used across all twelve papers, and serves as the registry of persistent identifiers assigned to each publication.
SDIS 01–12
Twelve technical reports.
Read in order. Each paper is a standalone briefing with a persistent DOI; together they form the Sovereign Stack.
Foundations of Digital Sovereignty
Sovereign AIDefinitions, drivers, and a reference framework for national digital infrastructure.
Sovereign Cloud Architectures
Sovereign CloudTechnical patterns for jurisdictional control over compute, storage, and operations.
Data Localization and Residency
Data SovereigntyTechnical and legal mechanisms for controlling where data lives and moves.
Sovereign Digital Identity
Digital IdentityArchitectures for national eID, wallets, and trust frameworks.
Compute Sovereignty
ComputeAI infrastructure, semiconductor dependency, and strategic autonomy in the GPU era.
Interoperability and Standards
StandardsAvoiding sovereign fragmentation through shared technical protocols.
Critical Infrastructure Resilience
ResilienceThreat models and continuity design for sovereign digital systems.
Sovereign Cybersecurity
CybersecurityZero trust architectures and post-quantum readiness for national systems.
Central Bank Digital Currencies and Sovereign Financial Rails
Financial RailsTechnical architecture for state-issued digital money.
Public Sector Cloud Procurement
ProcurementGovernance models for sovereign technology adoption.
Cross-Border Data Governance
Data GovernanceTreaties, adequacy frameworks, and technical enforcement of data flow rules.
The Sovereign Stack
ArchitectureA reference architecture for national digital infrastructure.
Research feature
Photonic chips: computing with light.
D-AI's frontier silicon-photonics program reimagines the AI accelerator — replacing electrons with photons to break the power and heat ceilings that limit national-scale intelligence.
10×
Compute per watt vs. leading electronic accelerators
<1 ns
On-chip matrix-multiply latency at the speed of light
~90%
Reduction in interconnect heat generation
8 λ
Wavelengths multiplexed per waveguide for parallel math
Light instead of electrons
Matrix multiplication — the core operation of every neural network — is performed by interfering beams of light in silicon photonic meshes, eliminating the resistive losses that cap electronic chips.
Wavelength parallelism
By multiplexing multiple wavelengths through a single waveguide, a photonic tensor core executes many independent operations simultaneously, multiplying throughput without shrinking transistors.
Energy at national scale
At gigafactory scale, a 10× efficiency gain translates into hundreds of megawatts saved — the difference between a sovereign program that is financeable and one that is not.
Sovereign fabrication path
Photonic dies can be manufactured on mature nodes rather than bleeding-edge fabs, opening a realistic route to in-country production and supply-chain independence.
Program roadmap
Phase 01In lab
Photonic tensor core
Silicon photonic mesh demonstrating optical matrix multiplication with electronic control plane.
Phase 02In design
Hybrid electro-photonic package
Co-packaged optics bonded to electronic SRAM and control logic for a complete accelerator.
Phase 03R&D roadmap
Sovereign photonic module
Rack-deployable module integrated into the LLM Box and gigafactory compute fabric.