Who owns it?
oceans next generation Inc. is 100% Canadian-owned and owns 100% of oceans GmbH in Germany. No US parent, no US investors, no hyperscaler behind us.
Digital sovereignty · Initiative
Residency is where the data sleeps. Sovereignty is who can wake it up.
Everyone wants sovereignty. Nobody scores it. The Digital Sovereign Initiative makes it measurable, with three questions for every contract that touches sensitive data: Who owns it? Whose law can reach it? Can you leave? Location alone scores zero.
Residency is an address
Residency is where the servers sit. Much of what is sold as sovereign follows one of three patterns: incorporated here, governed abroad. Headquartered here, owned abroad. Built here, for foreign tenants. Every one of them has a maple leaf on the brochure. None of them gives Canada control.
Nobody deletes a question. They swap a word. Ownership becomes "operational control". Jurisdiction becomes a "commitment" to challenge foreign orders, but a promise to resist a law is not an exemption from it. Exit becomes "portability": you can download your data, but nobody runs a department on a download.
The test: three questions
For every contract that touches sensitive data. All three: full credit. One or two: partial. Location alone: zero. Not every workload has to pass. A public website doesn't. Defence, health, identity, critical infrastructure and the AI that touches them do.
Who owns it?
The operator and its anchor tenants, traced to the beneficial owner.
Whose law can reach it?
Can any foreign law force the operator, its parent or its tenant to hand over data held in Canada?
Can you leave?
Without a rebuild. With open standards, and an exit cost and an exit time, in writing.
We sell this. So the test applies to us first.
Sovereign cloud and confidential AI, on hardware we own. Our answers to the three questions:
Whose law can reach it?
Each client contracts with a company in their own jurisdiction, and their data is processed and stored there, on dedicated bare metal that no one else shares. No shared hyperscaler cloud, anywhere. Canadian clients contract with cloud&more in Canada. Everything we run for them is on hardware we own, controlled in Canada, only in Canada. European clients contract with oceans GmbH, a German company under German and EU law. Their data is processed and stored in Germany, on bare-metal servers dedicated exclusively to us by a German data centre partner. Clients in the United States contract with cloud&more. Their data is processed and stored in the United States, on bare-metal servers dedicated exclusively to us. Who owns the company, who owns the hardware, whose law can reach it and what leaving costs: in writing, in every offer.
Can you leave?
Open source and open standards, on infrastructure we control. You get the exit cost and the exit time from us in writing.
Leaving is not a theory
Schleswig-Holstein is doing it
A German state of three million people is moving its administration to open software, including Nextcloud. In order: documents, then mail, then files.
About €9M, once
For about 30,000 public-sector workplaces and 44,000 mailboxes.
Over €15M saved in licences
Every year. The question for every renewal: what would it cost us to leave?
Frequently asked questions
- Is this a product?
- No. It is the position behind the products. There is nothing to license, and no part of it is gated behind a contract with us.
- What does digital sovereignty actually mean?
- That you decide who can access your data and whose law governs that access. Not where a server is, but who can be compelled to open it. Everything else follows from that distinction.
- Are GPUs in Canada sovereign AI?
- No. Ask who controls four things: the model, the training data, the prompts and the logs. A foreign model, called from a Canadian rack, is sovereign latency. Not sovereign AI. The logs matter more than they get credit for: an AI agent's log is a record of everything it touched. AI, four controls: the model, the training data, the prompts, the logs. We run local models we have tested and checked, on hardware we own. Where a workload needs more, it runs on privatemode.ai: a confidential computing environment in which a model we control processes your data encrypted end to end. Which model your offer uses, and which of the four controls we hold, is in the offer, in writing.
- What should we ask at our next renewal?
- For the price of leaving, in writing: cost, time, sequence. Not a decision to leave. A price. And ask every bidder to answer the three questions, in writing, signed by an officer.
- How does this relate to digitalsovereign.ca?
- That is the Initiative's own site, where the longer-form material lives. This page explains where it sits within the oceans Group.
Let's start scoring what matters
When the buyer doesn't write the definition, the seller does. If you want the three questions in your next tender and would like a second opinion: this conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.