What does AI sovereignty mean for Latin America? The case of Latam-GPT

Latam-GPT, led by Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) with 65 institutions from 15 countries, was released in February 2026 and is called "the first model developed for Latin America." The model is built on Meta's open-source LLaMA using continual pretraining (CPT) and uses Amazon Web Services infrastructure. It is expected to serve as an open-source alternative that does not depend on big tech companies, but it also leaves questions: which AI supply chain components must be built in-house to count as sovereignty.