The New Rules of Global Tech: Geopolitics, Fragmentation, and How Ambitious Companies Can Still Win
In conversation with Sabina Maria Ciofu, International Policy & Strategy Lead at techUK
There is a version of the global tech story that goes like this: build something brilliant, connect to the Internet, and the world is yours. Open markets. Frictionless borders. A digital economy designed, in its architecture, for borderless growth.
That story is over. Or at least, it’s being rewritten: fast, and not by the companies that built it.
Sabina Maria Ciofu
International Policy&Strategy Lead at techUK
Sabina Maria Chiofu has a front-row seat to the rewrite. As International Policy and Strategy Lead at techUK, the trade association representing over 1,200 UK technology companies from the largest multinationals to a long tail of ambitious SMEs, she spends her days at the intersection of government power and commercial ambition. Normally based in Brussels, she joined The Prime View in London to make sense of a world that, by her own admission, is almost impossible to predict.
What follows is not a comfortable picture. But it is an honest one, and for founders and business leaders trying to grow internationally, honest is exactly what you need.
Watch the full interview here.
Geopolitics Is Now a Product Problem
Ask most startup founders what their biggest challenges are and you’ll hear: product-market fit, hiring, funding. What you won’t hear, but should, is geopolitics.
That’s changing, whether companies want it to or not.
We do interesting stuff in technology in the UK, but all of it with some geopolitical impact. Therefore, there is competition between countries: compliance burden, new barriers in the digital economy.
The US-China tech war has cascaded into supply chain anxiety, export controls, sanctions, and a fundamental uncertainty about which markets are accessible, on what terms, and for how long. Countries that once provided stable footholds for expansion are now pressure points in someone else’s bilateral dispute.
“Those tensions are a major problem,” Sabina says. “It does affect the way other countries are behaving, it does affect the security of supply chains… and countries having to navigate how they deal with both the US and China.”
And the instability cuts both ways. Even a potential thaw between Washington and Beijing creates complexity: “Things are changing really fast. And I think that’s what makes it really confusing and complicated for other countries to plan around, because we are all exposed to what the US and China are doing in the tech sector in general.”
For a 25-person company in Oxford doing genuinely innovative work, this is not an abstract policy discussion. It is the terrain they have to cross to grow.
The Regulatory Storm That Never Stopped
If geopolitics is the weather, European regulation has become the microclimate: complex, layered, and in places, contradictory.
The EU AI Act was meant to be a landmark. And in many ways it is. But Sabina’s assessment of where Brussels finds itself right now is revealing: not triumphant, but reassessing.
There’s a conversation in Brussels now around how to simplify some of the regulations, how do we make them practicable, how do we make them easy to implement and easy to understand.
The problem isn’t any single law. It’s the accumulation of laws: on data, on cyber, on AI, on digital services, on marketplaces, on competition. Most of them arrived in the last five years, and many of them overlap. Companies face multiple reporting obligations, often to different regulators, sometimes for the same underlying activity.
For companies to be able to comply with something, they need to understand which regulator is responsible for what, when they have to report something, and to whom. For a machinery that is very good at regulating, we need to pause sometimes and make sure that it’s streamlined, coherent, and that companies can actually deal with and implement it.
Fragmentation: The Hidden Competitor
Here is a challenge that doesn’t appear on any pitch deck but shapes the growth ceiling of almost every European tech business: the digital single market is not, in practice, very single.
The EU has built extraordinary regulatory infrastructure. But the implementation of that infrastructure varies dramatically between member states. The rules are nominally common; the reality on the ground is fragmented.
Sabina is clear-eyed about the consequences: “The world is just a much more complicated place for a smaller company to navigate now than five or ten years ago, when the world was your oyster. You could go anywhere and grow a company across borders and benefit from the openness of the digital economy.”
Part of what’s driving fragmentation is something almost sympathetic: governments legitimately asking hard questions about resilience. Post-COVID, post-supply chain shock, post-energy crisis: policymakers want to know how dependent their economies are on foreign technology, foreign infrastructure, foreign data centres.
But legitimate questions can generate blunt answers.
What’s coming out of that sometimes is knee-jerk reactions that feel a bit like protectionism. It’s like: I’ll put up a wall here and I’ll put up a wall there, I’ll close up my market here, and give some contracts to my own companies.
The irony is acute. Policies designed to protect domestic tech often hurt the domestic SMEs they nominally champion, by raising compliance costs, restricting market access, and adding friction at exactly the moment when those companies need to move fast.
The Digital Sovereignty Trap
“Digital sovereignty” has become a rallying cry in Brussels, in national capitals, and in boardrooms trying to anticipate regulatory direction. Sabina’s take is bracingly realistic.
I don’t think digital independence actually exists or is in the realm of possibility. The US is not digitally independent. China is not digitally independent. We all depend on each other to some extent. That’s how we built the digital economy.
The spectrum, she argues, runs from full protectionism: no Chinese tech, no American tech, to full openness. And the further you move toward the protectionist end, the more you pay in capability and cost. For most economies, the math doesn’t work.
What Sabina proposes instead is a reframe – away from sovereignty as an end in itself, toward a set of concrete outcomes: resilience to geopolitical shocks, a competitive economy, strategic agency in areas of real strength.
If I have a competitive economy, if I have something that other people need, if I have leverage in the global economy – that gives me resilience, that gives me sovereignty.
That reframe matters for companies too. The question isn’t “how do I insulate my business from the world?” It’s “how do I build something the world needs, and position strategically within trusted networks?”
The UK Bet: Applications Over Foundation Models
For companies based in the UK or considering it as a base, there is a more specific question: where does the UK actually sit in the global AI race?
Sabina’s view is both realistic and genuinely optimistic. The UK is already a leading AI economy by most indicators: research institutions, universities, access to finance, startup ecosystem. The gap is deployment – getting the rest of the economy to actually use AI, not just the tech sector building it.
The next step is adoption, the deployment of technology in all other sectors of the economy. This is not about tech companies adopting AI, it’s about the rest of the economy adopting AI.
The government has set a big target: they want to be the biggest adopter of AI among G7 countries. It can add up to a trillion pounds to the UK economy in the next decade if we get this right. That’s a big number, and it points to where the opportunity may lie for companies that want to grow in the UK market and beyond.
The Path Forward: Five Principles for Companies That Want to Win
Drawing on everything Sabina shared, here is what emerges as practical guidance for businesses navigating this moment:
Lead with trust, not just technology. Your product may be brilliant. That’s necessary but not sufficient. If the people you need to adopt it: customers, procurement teams, regulators, partners, don’t trust you, adoption stalls. Build trust into how you communicate, how you handle data, and how you engage with scrutiny.
Treat geopolitics as a supply chain question. Map your dependencies: which infrastructure, components, models, and markets are you reliant on and what is the geopolitical risk profile of each? Diversification isn’t a weakness. It’s resilience.
Engage with policy before it engages with you. The companies that find compliance hardest are those that show up to regulation after the rules are written. The ones that find it manageable are those that helped write them, or at least understood what was coming. Trade associations like techUK exist precisely to give companies access to that process.
Think in trusted networks, not open markets. The era of frictionless global access is not coming back. The replacement isn’t walls, it’s webs of trusted partnerships between governments and between companies. Map your expansion strategy against who the UK’s and EU’s trusted partners are, and build into those corridors.
Compete on applications, not infrastructure. For most companies, the race to build frontier models is not the race to win. The race to build sector-specific applications that deploy AI in healthcare, finance, logistics, energy, and professional services – that’s where the decade’s value is being created. And it’s a race where domain expertise, customer trust, and regulatory fluency matter as much as model capability.
The Optimist’s Conclusion
Sabina is, by her own description, an optimist. Not a naïve one, she is clear-eyed about the risks, the conflicts, the anxieties. But her conclusion is not despair.
I think it will need all hands and all minds on the deck to make sure sense prevails and humanity moves in a positive direction.
The world is more complicated than it was. The compliance burden is real. The geopolitical risk is real. The fragmentation is real.
But so is the opportunity. And the companies that will seize it are the ones that stop treating these forces as obstacles to their growth strategy, and start treating them as the terrain on which the growth strategy is built.
The rules have changed. The game has not. You can still win. You just need to understand the board.
This interview was conducted as part of The Prime View’s ongoing series featuring senior leaders at the intersection of technology, policy, and business strategy.