Digital Sovereignty, Data Infrastructures, and Structural Inequality: Artificial Intelligence and Global Governance.

Digital autonomy has become one of the main policy answers, which offers independence, regulation, and the progress of development. However, its distributive implications are not properly theorised. This article constructs a conceptual framework that connects digital sovereignty to infrastructural political economy and global stratification basing the theoretical ideas on South India as a theoretically generative location. Its revisions the concept of sovereignty based on international political economy, science and technology studies and critical data scholarship as infrastructural bargaining power embedded in the world systems of production. Data localisation, digital public infrastructure, and regional artificial intelligence innovation ecosystems are sovereignty claims that are implemented in South India. These policies improve the local capacity and policy alignment, but are structurally entrenched in concentrated cloud markets, semiconductor supply chains, and asymmetry in the foundation model building. Digital sovereignty is thus emergent, multi-dimensional and partial instead of absolute. The article redefines artificial intelligence governance as a multi-scalar struggle of material capacity and rule-making power by locating the regional infrastructural development in transnational technological hierarchies. It posits that in the absence of redistribution of compute resources and collaborative standard-setting processes, sovereignty discourses will distort structural inequalities in the world AI order.