A Score Built to Flag Openness as Loss
On July 3, 2026, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, working with the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, published a Digital Sovereignty Index report giving Argentina 2.00 out of 5.0 — a composite of sixteen indicators, none scoring above Level 3, covering the 2024–2026 Milei administration. The report's central complaints are specific: Argentina's November 2025–February 2026 data-adequacy commitment to the United States triggers what the index calls "collapse through extreme permissiveness," writing that "the adequacy designation to the dominant jurisdiction of data platforms removes the only protective barrier." And OpenAI's 500MW data center with Sur Energy, financed under the Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones (RIGI), is scored as "foreign hyperscaler capacity settled in the territory, not domestic cloud or foundational-model capacity."
Both criticisms deserve to be taken seriously before they're contested.
The Case the Report Makes
The adequacy concern is not baseless. On February 5, 2026, Argentina and the United States signed a Reciprocal Trade and Investment framework in which Buenos Aires committed to "recognizing the United States as an adequate jurisdiction under Argentine law for the cross-border transfer of data, including personal data," and to refrain from digital services taxes or discrimination against U.S. digital products. The United States has no comprehensive federal privacy statute comparable to the EU's GDPR or Argentina's own Ley 25.326, and U.S. law enforcement retains broad extraterritorial reach over data held by U.S. cloud providers under the CLOUD Act. Handing that jurisdiction a blanket adequacy finding, without a reciprocal U.S. commitment to Argentine-style protections, is a real asymmetry, and civil-society critics are right to name it.
The data-center critique also has a kernel worth granting: a 500MW facility built and operated primarily to serve a U.S. AI lab's compute needs is not the same thing as a domestic capability to train or serve foundation models. If "sovereignty" means the capacity to build and control frontier AI infrastructure independent of any single foreign counterparty, hosting someone else's hardware doesn't get you there on its own.
Why the Score Overreaches
But the index's methodology conflates two very different things: coercion and choice. Argentina did not lose its data-protection law. Ley 25.326 remains in force, and — a fact the report doesn't weigh against its own score — Argentina has independently held an EU adequacy decision under Directive 95/46/EC since June 30, 2003, one of a handful of countries worldwide the European Commission still trusts with EU citizens' data more than two decades later. The new U.S. commitment is an outbound recognition negotiated as part of a reciprocal trade package, not a repeal of inbound protections. Calling a negotiated trade concession a "collapse" assumes any accommodation of a more powerful trading partner is a defeat rather than a bargain — foreclosing the possibility that Argentina judged the trade-and-investment gains worth the adequacy concession, and ignoring that Argentina retains the sovereign authority to revoke the designation if U.S. practice diverges.
The RIGI data-center finding runs into a sharper problem: the standard applied — meaningful sovereignty requires domestic cloud or foundation-model capacity — is one that almost no country outside the United States and China currently clears, including most of the EU. RIGI itself is a 30-year fiscal-stability regime built explicitly to pull in capital Argentina cannot generate domestically: a 25% income-tax rate, accelerated depreciation, and duty-free imports in exchange for a minimum $200 million commitment. The Stargate Argentina project, announced as a roughly $25 billion investment built around Patagonian renewable capacity, is precisely what that regime was designed to attract — energy investment, construction jobs, and a claim to regional AI infrastructure that Argentina would not otherwise have the balance sheet to build alone. Scoring the RIGI project as a sovereignty loss penalizes Argentina for using the one policy lever, foreign-capital incentives, that let it compete for the investment at all.
The Proportionate Read
None of this means the underlying risks are imaginary. Argentina's negotiators could have sought a sunset clause or periodic review on the U.S. adequacy finding, and RIGI's local-content rules (a 20% minimum spend with domestic suppliers) could be paired with a genuine push toward sovereign compute capacity rather than treated as a consolation prize. Those are the real policy questions. But a headline score of 2.00/5.0 built on indicators that treat trade agreements and inbound investment as structural failures isn't a diagnostic tool policymakers should calibrate against — it's a scorecard that would rate almost any emerging economy's engagement with global markets as a form of subjugation, regardless of the terms actually negotiated.