Journal of Modern Technology and Engineering

The rapid development of AI is generating three interrelated structural transformations within the global digital ecosystem. First, AI is increasingly being integrated into both existing and newly emerging digital infrastructures, altering their architecture, functional role, and strategic significance as these systems begin to operate as embedded cognitive infrastructures shaping knowledge production, decision-making, and institutional processes. Second, this transformation is accompanied by a growing concentration of computational capacity, data ecosystems, and advanced model architectures within a limited number of technological actors, signaling the emergence of a cognitive–informational order in which influence is exercised through the architectures that shape how knowledge is generated, interpreted, and operationalized. Third, this concentration is coalescing into distinct geocognitive power poles whose competing infrastructural ecosystems generate structural asymmetries that position small and medium-sized states within regimes of cognitive–informational dependence. To conceptualize these transformations, the paper introduces the concepts of the cognitive–informational order and geocognitive power poles. Its primary contribution is the development of the Governed Interdependence paradigm, which reconceptualizes digital sovereignty as the institutional capacity to govern structured participation in globally distributed AI infrastructures rather than to achieve full technological autonomy. As a secondary, design-oriented contribution, the paper proposes the Governance Membrane as a reference architecture for operationalizing this paradigm. Within that architecture, the Normative Compliance Model, the Infrastructure Status Index, and the Cognitive Dependence Index are introduced as complementary instruments for normative alignment and governance calibration. The sovereign SLM+RAG configuration is discussed as one possible operational pathway through which the architecture may be instantiated in contexts where embedded-mode governance is feasible. The paper argues that, in the AI era, digital sovereignty is more plausibly pursued through institutionally governed interdependence than through technological autonomy.