DREAM pitches sovereign AI for governments

Austrian-Israeli AI company DREAM is pitching governments on systems it says can give them control over models, infrastructure and data as concerns grow over technological dependence on the United States and China.

“Being sovereign means that you control and you own the model and the infrastructure,” chief executive Shalev Hulio said on July 9 at the RAISE technology summit in Paris. “The government eventually needs to control the full stack.”

Co-founder and former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz declined to name specific countries DREAM works with, but cited the Middle East, southeast Asia and Europe as regions where it is active. He said customers shared a desire not to be fully dependent on the United States or China.

The company says it can deploy AI systems without needing access to customer data or an internet connection. Hulio said that meant “nobody can shut it down.”

Hulio said DREAM would use a recent $260 million fundraising round to expand into new regions including Germany and Latin America, while also looking at the United States and Singapore. He said the company also planned to triple the size of an Israeli data centre used for training AI models from its current “hundreds” of graphics processing units.

The scale is far smaller than the hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units operated by large cloud providers such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services, but Hulio said most governments were not going to build huge data centres.