If you were handed a stroopwafel for every time you heard the term “data sovereignty” at IBC 2026, some attendees would be leaving Amsterdam with sugar withdrawals, while others would be heading home empty handed. Something of an undercurrent of this year’s tradeshow, away from the attention-grabbing agents and AI demos, data sovereignty conversations captured a shift in how media companies are thinking about infrastructure. Yet we are reluctant to write yet another story on how nobody trusts US hyperscalers anymore. A more interesting development is that sovereignty is becoming about who controls the infrastructure, where previously arguments centered on where physical servers are located. Sovereignty is now about the data flowing through these servers and, increasingly, the intelligence being…