The End of the US Cloud Monopoly: AI Balkanization Is Here to Stay

By Vilius Vystartas | June 2026 The single, globally unified internet is gone. What's replacing it is a patchwork of sovereign AI zones, each running its own stack on its own hardware with its own rules. This isn't a prediction. It's already happening, and the next three years will cement it. What Broke the Monopoly The US government's approach to AI regulation — treating frontier model weights as controlled munitions — had an unintended consequence. By demonstrating that access to...