Leo Borges
Chief Engineer - GenAI
Commbank
Sovereignty Is an Inference Problem
Sovereignty Is an Inference Problem
AI sovereignty isn’t about where the GPUs sit. It’s about who can switch the intelligence off.
Australia is spending billions on sovereign AI infrastructure. But onshore compute running models subject to another country’s export controls is still a dependency. Owning the building isn’t owning the model.
Enterprises have the same blind spot. Running one closed model through two providers looks like redundancy — until both depend on the same weights and export regime. That’s two doors to one room.
This talk connects national AI strategy with production architecture: how to build an open-weight fallback, why model provenance matters as much as infrastructure, and how enterprise demand can reshape what hyperscalers build.
The takeaway: sovereignty isn’t a grant we wait for. It’s a demand signal.
Leo Borges
Leonardo Borges is Chief Engineer for Generative AI at CommBank, where he leads engineering strategy for AI adoption across one of the world's largest financial institutions. Previously Senior Director of AI Engineering at Optus, he has spent over a decade building production distributed systems and now focuses on the architecture, security, and evaluation challenges of deploying AI agents at enterprise scale.