Sovereignty for Sale
Mate, That’s Not a Sovereign Cloud…
This week, the Australian Government proudly announced a $20 billion “sovereign” investment strategy - not in local startups, not in Australian cloud infrastructure, not even in open-source innovation - but with Amazon Web Services.
That’s right. Sovereign. With Amazon.
It’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry.
Let’s be crystal clear: Amazon is not sovereign. It’s a US-based hyperscaler, answerable to Washington, beholden to shareholders, and governed by the CLOUD Act - which allows the US government to access data wherever it resides, as long as it sits under a US company. You can host that data in Sydney, Canberra, or the Moon - it doesn’t matter.
Sovereignty isn’t just about where your data is stored, it’s about who controls it.
A $20 Billion Deal… for What, Exactly?
The announcement was wrapped in the usual media-friendly fog of “digital transformation,” “national resilience,” and “job creation.” But scratch the surface and you’ll find the same old song: a government dazzled by global tech brands, pouring billions into proprietary platforms and calling it innovation.
Let’s get real. This is less “nation-building” and more nation-renting. We’re building more AWS real estate - not Australian capability.
This isn’t strategy; it’s spectacle.
Albanese wanted a Trump-style photo-op - big logo, bigger cheque - but instead of fist-bumping Saudi princes, he’s high-fiving AWS CEO Matt Garman.
(nope, buying the tech future of an entire country doesn’t even get Bezos in the room…)
Proprietary Stack, Permanent Lock-In
AWS doesn’t sell you tools - it sells you dependence. Want AI? Here’s SageMaker - now good luck extracting your models and workflows. Want storage? Great - we’ll move your data in for free and charge you a fortune to get it back out. Want to innovate? Only within the four walls of Amazon’s ecosystem.
This is how vendor lock-in works. And now we’re locking in our government, our critical services, our digital future - all to one American platform. Lock-in becomes policy, and policy becomes national destiny.
If sovereignty means self-determination, this is its opposite.
The Jobs Myth
Let’s talk about jobs. We’ve been sold the fantasy that hyperscaler investment equals tens of thousands of local jobs.
The reality? A few hundred data center staff, a scattering of tech support roles, and an army of global consulting firms billing Canberra by the hour. The high-paying cloud roles are largely funnelled through global consultancies or imported talent.
Meanwhile local startups - actual job multipliers - watch their local talent sucked into vendor partner programs and squeezed out by the bigger players.
Where’s the Australian IP? The deep tech companies? The platform innovation? Nowhere. Because this deal isn’t about growing local capability - it’s about leasing someone else’s.
History Repeats: From Dig-and-Ship to Click-and-Ship
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
A century ago we handed the keys to our iron ore, coal and gold fields to foreign miners. Today 86 percent of the mining sector is foreign-owned. Profits surge offshore; we keep the environmental bill and a skinny royalty cheque.
When Canberra tried a Resource Super Profits Tax in 2010, a $22 million ad blitz from the miners killed it. The compromise Minerals Resource Rent Tax limped in during 2012 - and was buried by 2014.
The RBA has noted that mining windfalls mainly flow to overseas shareholders as dividends, not Aussie pay packets. And despite boom-time revenues, mining still employs fewer people than arts & recreation - 235,000 vs 277,000 in 2024.
Same Playbook, New Resource
Swap ore trains for fibre-optic cables: AWS will extract subscription rents and AI IP while we applaud ribbon-cuttings. We’re doubling down on the exact dig-and-ship model that already drained our commodities boom-only now the spoil is our digital future.
A Chance to Flip the Script-Squandered
Norway flipped the script. By retaining majority state ownership of energy grids and channeling oil profits into the $1.8 trillion Government Pension Fund Global, every citizen now holds indirect equity (~A$350k each) and the state can invest counter-cyclically
We could have:
- Slapped a digital royalty on hyperscaler profits.
- Re-invested in open-source Australian LLMs.
- Seed-funded sovereign clouds and domestic R&D.
Instead, we signed a $20 billion export licence on our own data.
Different century, same colony economics.
What Sovereign Should Actually Look Like
If the government were serious about sovereignty, this is what it would fund:
✅ Tech education and R&D pipelines that feed into Aussie-founded companies
✅ Open-source AI models owned and trained in Australia
✅ Partner with like-minded mid-powers (Japan, France, Canada) to align on strategies
✅ Local cloud providers who build and operate under Australian law
✅ Digital public infrastructure that’s portable, interoperable, and transparent
Instead, we’re throwing taxpayer billions at Amazon. It’s like declaring independence by signing a lease with your landlord.
Smoke, Mirrors and Missed Opportunity
This is the great Australian tech illusion - press releases dressed as progress, American logos standing in for capability, and marketing language passed off as national security.
We’re told it’s a strategic partnership. In reality, it’s a dependency masquerading as ambition.
We’ve just minted a shiny new definition of an “Australian business”… and then handed a $20 billion AI crown jewel to a company that fails its very first ownership test. In one breath Canberra sells “Future Made in Australia,” in the next it gifts the keys to our digital mines to an American hyperscaler - history’s iron-ore dejà vu, now running on GPUs instead of pickaxes.
If it looks like shit and smells like shit… It probably is shit.
If We Want Sovereignty, We Need to Start Acting Like It
Sovereignty isn’t a line item on Amazon’s invoice. It’s something you build-patiently, deliberately, and yes, expensively - in Australia, by Australians, for Australians.
Until then, we’re just the lucky country leasing its luck to the highest foreign bidder.
