Cloud platforms have quietly become a strategic resource on par with energy and finance. Yet governments are trying to tame this shared infrastructure with old tools: borders, ownership caps, and data localization rules. This long-form analysis explains why geography is a poor proxy for security, how AI workloads tighten the link between cloud policy and national power, and what a more realistic framework for trust in compute infrastructure would look like. Instead of carving the internet into splintered jurisdictions, states need to demand verifiable technical assurances and shared security baselines that match how cloud systems actually function.