Independent Analyst Research
Digital Sovereignty: what this means for the UK
Detailed research, analysis and commentary on digital sovereignty with a focus on the UK. Find out who really owns the technology that organisations use every day, where the data is stored, what the points of failure are and what British businesses and policy makers can do about it.
What your organisation actually runs on
Every organisation sits on a stack of technology. Most people only ever see the top of it — email, documents, the systems they log into each morning. Underneath are the layers that make those work, right down to the chips and cables. Each layer can be changed without replacing the others, which is exactly why it is worth knowing who controls each one.
Note: Arm, whose chip designs sit inside more than 99% of the world’s smartphones, was built in Cambridge and is still based there — and is 86% owned by SoftBank of Tokyo, which formally declares Arm a controlled company. Source: Arm Holdings plc annual report, May 2026.
Where the money goes
We read the UK accounts that global software companies file at Companies House, to see how much of what British organisations spend actually stays in Britain. The answer varies enormously. Some run substantial British businesses selling to British customers. Others book very little here. And in some cases the UK company’s entire income comes not from customers at all, but from its own parent company overseas — the British arm is a service office rather than a business.
Salesforce and Civica state in their accounts that this is British business. The others confirm the money comes from customers rather than from within the group, but do not say how much of it is British.
Sources: company accounts filed at Companies House, most recent available (2024–2025 year ends); Amazon Web Services Europe FAQs, published by AWS. Figures are what each company books through its UK company, which is not the same as what British customers pay.
See all the supporting data for this research — every figure, the accounts it came from, and how we checked it.
