By Marga Hoek
A company can have strong demand, brilliant people, advanced technology and a convincing growth strategy, and still be stopped by a dependency it never truly controlled. A fuel source becomes political. A rare-earth magnet becomes unavailable. A shipping route becomes unsafe. A grid connection becomes too slow. A mineral supply chain becomes a strategic weapon. A supplier thousands of kilometres away suddenly determines whether a factory can run.
That is the business reality more leaders are now discovering: dependence has become one of the great value risks of our time. For decades, the dominant logic was simple: go global, go lean, go low-cost. It created scale, efficiency and profit. Today, the same systems that once created advantage can create exposure. The cheapest route can become the most fragile route. The most efficient supply chain can become the least resilient one. What once looked like operational excellence can, in a shock, become strategic weakness.
Sovereignty has therefore moved from politics into business. It is now a strategic capability: the freedom to keep growing when the world becomes less predictable. It is the ability to power, source, produce, compute, recover and serve customers with far less exposure to shocks outside the company’s control.
When Dependence Becomes a Balance-Sheet Event
The cost of dependence is already visible in company results. In 2022, Uniper reported a net loss of €19.1 billion, heavily driven by the cost of replacing undelivered Russia gas after Russian gas deliveries failed and replacement gas had to be procured at extreme cost.Demand for energy had not disappeared. The company’s role in the system had not disappeared. A critical input had moved outside its control, and the value destruction was immediate.
Industrial companies learned the same lesson. The end of cheap Russian gas entered factories, margins and investment decisions. For parts of European industry, energy dependence became a structural competitiveness issue almost overnight. The deeper message is clear: a business model built on inputs the company cannot secure carries a hidden discount. Volatility reveals that discount fast.
Critical minerals have become the next arena. The International Energy Agency warned in its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 that China is the dominant refiner for 19 of the 20 strategic minerals it analysed, with an average market share of around 70%. These materials sit inside electric vehicles, wind turbines, semiconductors, industrial motors, defence systems, aerospace technologies and AI infrastructure. In today’s economy, the smallest component can carry the largest strategic risk.
This is why sovereignty is moving front of mind for CEOs and Boards. Sensitive areas keep shifting: gas, semiconductors, rare earths, grid power, water, batteries, data centres, industrial software, export licences and AI compute. The map of dependency changes faster than traditional risk systems can follow. The essential business question is becoming sharper: what could stop this company from growing?
The Other Side of Risk Is Value
The strongest companies are beginning to treat volatility as a reason to reinvent how value is created. They are moving from protection to progress, from exposure to design, from dependence to advantage. Risk becomes more than something to manage. It becomes the starting point for innovation.
Every dependency contains a business opportunity for the company bold enough to redesign it. Energy exposure can become an energy strategy. Material scarcity can become a circular supply model. Opaque sourcing can become traceable value. Fragile logistics can become smarter regional ecosystems. Disruption can become the catalyst for better technology, stronger partnerships and new markets.
The sovereign company becomes stronger in the world by building options, intelligence and control where control matters. It designs itself to be less vulnerable to what sits outside its ownership. That is a more powerful way to look at volatility: as the reason to build growth differently.
Energy Independence Is Now Growth Security
Energy has moved from cost line to growth condition. AI, electrification, data centres, advanced manufacturing, mobility and industrial production all need reliable power at scale. A company that cannot secure energy cannot secure growth.
Leading companies are therefore becoming energy shapers. They are creating, contracting, storing and orchestrating the power they need for the future. That shift changes the nature of energy strategy: it becomes a margin strategy, a resilience strategy and a growth strategy at the same time.
JLR shows how this shift is entering industrial operations. In its 2026 annual reporting, JLR says its renewable energy strategy is intended to reduce reliance on grid energy and improve resilience to cost fluctuations, grid instability and disruptions. That matters because the company is transforming production for electrification while energy demand, grid pressure and market volatility are rising. Energy becomes part of the company’s growth architecture.
Google and Fervo Energy show the same logic at the frontier of AI infrastructure. Data centres need always-on power, and intermittent procurement alone does not solve that challenge. In Nevada, Google’s partnership with NV Energy, using enhanced geothermal power developed by Fervo Energy, was approved to add 115 MW of around-the-clock enhanced geothermal power to the grid supporting Google’s data centres and cloud region. This is more than clean-energy procurement. It is market-making for a new form of firm power.
Waste Is Now the New Mine
The resource story is changing just as quickly. In the old economy, waste was an end point. In the new economy, waste is future supply. JLR offers a clear business case. As it transforms its industrial operations for electrification, the company is putting tools, equipment and materials back into use instead of simply buying new. In 2025, JLR reported more than £100 million in value from reuse, refurbishment, repurposing and recycling initiatives across its UK and European operations. This is direct value retention: lower waste, lower exposure to new equipment needs and a more resilient operating model.
BMW is building that logic into future production. At Wackersdorf, BMW is relocating and significantly expanding its Recycling and Dismantling Centre into a new Competence Centre Circularity, strengthening resource efficiency, technology development and the industrial learning needed for the next generation of vehicles. Dismantling, material recovery and design learning become strategic manufacturing capabilities.
Redwood Materials takes the same idea into the battery economy. Together with Crusoe, Redwood launched a 12 MW, 63 MWh second-life battery microgrid in Nevada that combines solar and repurposed EV batteries to power modular AI data centres. Old batteries become storage. Storage supports renewable power. Renewable power serves AI. AI growth helps finance circular battery systems. The circular economy becomes infrastructure for the intelligence economy.
The answer to scarcity is better recovery, smarter design and new business models that keep value moving.
Material Independence Is Now Market Power
Materials now decide who can scale. For electric mobility, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, defence, digital infrastructure and AI, critical minerals are strategic capacity. The company that can secure, recover, substitute or redesign critical inputs has more freedom than the company waiting for the next shipment, licence or price shock.
Circularity has moved far beyond waste reduction. It is now one of the most practical ways to reduce exposure and create new supply. This is why the material question has become a growth question. Companies that understand their material flows can reduce dependency, retain value and create new market positions where others still see waste, cost or constraint.
In the UK, Mint Innovation, JLR, LiBatt Recycling and WMG at the University of Warwick secured £8.1 million to advance lithium-ion battery recycling. The consortium aims to recover lithium, cobalt and nickel from end-of-life batteries and strengthen an onshore circular supply base for the automotive sector. The power of the case lies in the combination: automotive demand, recycling capacity, refining technology and research strength are brought together to build a supply chain that no single player could create alone.
This is the new form of sovereignty: strategic independence where dependence has become too expensive. The mine of the future is already in our products, factories and cities.
Technology Is Now the Sovereignty Engine
Sovereignty at scale requires technology. The complexity is too large, the shocks too fast and the dependencies too hidden for traditional systems alone. Agentic AI, digital twins, traceability platforms, advanced recycling, robotics, computer vision, material passports, 3D printing and smart energy orchestration are becoming the operating tools of the sovereign company.
These technologies make it possible to see risks earlier, simulate alternatives, verify provenance, recover materials, shift energy demand, redesign products and respond before disruption becomes damage. This changes the economics of resilience. In the old model, resilience often meant more stock, more duplication and more cost. In the new model, intelligence makes resilience more precise. A company can know which supplier is exposed, which route is vulnerable, which material is at risk, which component can be produced closer to demand and which energy load can move in time.
Gartner forecasts that supply-chain-management software with agentic AI capabilities will grow from less than $2 billion in 2025 to $53 billion by 2030. That is a signal that companies are moving from static planning to intelligent orchestration.
Technology for good, for good reason the title of my latest book, therefore, gains a sharper business meaning. It is technology embedded at the core to redesign how the company powers, sources, produces, recovers and grows.
The New Winners Build Ecosystems
The strongest examples of sovereignty are rarely single company moves. They are partnerships between large international companies, hyper-growth scaling companies, governments, universities, energy providers, technology builders and investors. This matters because the dependencies are systemic. Energy, materials, data, water, logistics and industrial capacity require connected solutions.
Here, hypescale growth must be understood correctly as a scale-up growing exponentially fast toward unicorn status and beyond. These hyper-scaling companies are vital because they move quickly, open new markets and bring technologies from breakthrough to deployment and scale.
Fervo in geothermal energy, Redwood in battery materials, Mint in metal recovery and Stegra in green steel, all demonstrate why these companies matter. They are market creators. When they partner with companies such as Google, JLR or Microsoft, they accelerate the infrastructure of the future economy.
The geography of sovereignty differs around the world. In the United States, the emphasis is often on domestic supply chains, energy storage and AI infrastructure. In Europe, circular manufacturing, industrial reinvention and materials recovery are becoming central. In China, the Ordos-Envision Net Zero Industrial Park is attracting EV, battery, renewable energy and hydrogen industries into a cluster powered largely by green electricity and enabled by an AIoT energy and carbon platform. In Chile, BHP’s Escondida and Spence copper operations moved toward 100% renewable electricity while Escondida operates with desalinated water, showing why water and power security are now part of industrial competitiveness.
The next advantage will be built by the ecosystems companies dare to create.
From Fragility to Freedom
Sovereignty becomes practical when translated into business language. It means fewer shocks that can stop production, more control over energy costs, better access to critical materials, more predictable margins, stronger customer trust, faster response to disruption and more freedom to invest when others are forced to wait.
A company self-powered by renewable energy is less exposed to fossil-fuel volatility. A company recovering critical materials is less exposed to export controls. A company reusing assets is less dependent on unnecessary capex. A company using digital intelligence is less surprised by disruption. A company designing for circularity cannot be held hostage to virgin resource markets.
This is why sovereignty will increasingly influence valuations, investment decisions and leadership agendas. It changes the quality of earnings. It makes growth more credible because it makes the foundations of growth more secure. The sovereign company has designed itself to be less vulnerable to what it does not own.
Freedom to operate becomes freedom to grow.
The Question Every Leader Should Ask
Every company now needs an honest and complete map of its dependencies. The comfortable map of customers, markets and growth ambitions is no longer enough. Leaders need the deeper map beneath the business model: where energy comes from, where materials are refined, where components are made, where data is processed, where water is sourced, where waste goes, where transport routes converge and where political decisions can suddenly turn efficiency into fragility.
That map may be uncomfortable, it probably will be. It is also one of the most valuable maps a company can create. Once a dependency is visible, it can become a strategy. Once exposure is understood, it can become innovation. Once risk is redesigned, it can become growth. This is not just an executive task. The Board needs to demand, understand and question this map as part of its core risk-v.
The companies that lead from here will use instability as the reason to build better systems now. They will power differently, source differently, produce differently, compute differently, recover differently and grow differently.
Sovereignty is now serious business.
Marga Hoek, Global Business Thinker, Board Member and Speaker
