Can countries really regulate AI if they don’t control the compute?

I keep hearing AI governance discussed as if every country is sitting at the same table with roughly the same amount of influence. But most countries don’t control the chips, cloud infrastructure, data centers, or frontier models they’re being asked to regulate. They can write rules, but enforcement still depends heavily on infrastructure owned by a small number of governments and private companies. That makes me wonder whether this is really a regulation problem or an ownership problem. Can a country meaningfully govern advanced AI if it cannot independently inspect the systems, control the compute they run on, or enforce decisions against the companies operating them? I’m not saying regulation is pointless. I’m just not convinced legal authority means much without technical leverage behind it. Curious how people here see it. Does regulation eventually reshape who controls the infrastructure, or will the countries that own the compute always have the final say?