IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the general availability of IBM Sovereign Core, a software platform designed to help organizations build and operate AI-ready sovereign environments while maintaining control over their systems and data.

The platform addresses digital sovereignty across four areas: operational sovereignty for environment control, data sovereignty for data management, technology sovereignty through open architecture, and AI sovereignty for model governance. IBM Sovereign Core integrates control plane, identity, security, compliance, and AI execution functions within a single deployment model.

Key features include a customer-operated control plane for configuration and lifecycle management, in-boundary identity and encryption services, continuous compliance monitoring, preloaded regulatory frameworks, and governed AI execution within defined boundaries. The platform uses open standards to support portability and avoid vendor lock-in.

"AI has made sovereignty a runtime requirement, not a policy statement," said Dinesh Nirmal, SVP of IBM Software. "With IBM Sovereign Core, organizations don't have to choose between deploying AI at speed and verifying their control."

The platform enables real-time compliance validation, maintains audit-ready evidence within sovereign boundaries, and supports AI model deployment entirely within controlled environments. Organizations can control where AI processing occurs and maintain traceability of model execution and decisions.

IBM Sovereign Core is built on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI technologies. The platform includes an extensible catalog with pre-vetted IBM, third-party, and open source software from partners including AMD, ATOS, Cegeka, Cloudera, Dell, Elastic, HCL, Intel, Mistral, MongoDB, and Palo Alto Networks.

The platform targets enterprises running regulated applications, government organizations supporting sovereign operations, and service providers delivering sovereign cloud services. IBM announced the general availability during its Think 2026 conference in Boston.