Technological Sovereignty for Europe
January 27, 2026
Europe’s debate about “technological sovereignty” is often framed as pride or protectionism. That framing is too shallow. The real question is whether Europe can remain a self-governing civilization in a world where intelligence, infrastructure, and industrial capacity are increasingly encoded in software, models, chips, and cloud platforms.
Sovereignty used to mean borders, armies, currency, and the rule of law. Today it also means who controls the computational substrate that runs public administration, finance, healthcare, logistics, energy systems, and the information environment. When the backbone of society depends on infrastructure owned and governed elsewhere, sovereignty becomes conditional—granted by contracts, pricing, export controls, and distant legal regimes.
This is not a call for isolation. Europe benefits enormously from open markets, scientific exchange, and allied cooperation. But openness without capacity creates asymmetry: you can be “open” while others hold the keys to your critical systems. The point of sovereignty is optionality—Europe can collaborate by choice, not by necessity.
Technological sovereignty is therefore best understood as risk management for a complex society. It is a response to concentration risk in cloud and platforms, jurisdictional risk around data and AI, and supply-chain risk in semiconductors, raw materials, and energy-intensive compute. These dependencies rarely hurt in calm times; they become decisive under stress—crisis, coercion, war, sanctions, or systemic cyber failure.
At the same time, sovereignty is an economic strategy. The future value of the economy will compound around the owners of platforms, models, standards, and the learning loops created by data and usage. If Europe only “uses” advanced technology but doesn’t own strategic layers of the stack, it will pay rents indefinitely while watching talent, profits, and strategic control drift elsewhere.
There is also a democratic dimension. Modern politics now runs through digital intermediaries: recommender systems, ad-tech, identity, and the content generation capabilities of AI. If the information environment is governed primarily by external actors, enforcement of European rights and democratic safeguards becomes fragile, slow, and reactive.
Sovereignty also determines trust. Europeans will not adopt AI broadly in government, health, and education if they believe systems are opaque, unaccountable, or vulnerable to external access. Trust is not a marketing issue; it is built through enforceable governance and infrastructure that makes privacy, security, and auditability real.
Finally, Europe’s sovereignty must be compatible with its climate and social goals. AI and cloud growth are energy- and resource-intensive; without the ability to steer infrastructure design, Europe risks importing an economic model that clashes with affordability, grid constraints, and decarbonization commitments. Sovereignty is the ability to optimize technology for Europe’s priorities rather than accept someone else’s defaults.
Reduce dependency on foreign tech giants
Europe’s core digital stack (cloud, platforms, AI tooling) is dominated by non-EU actors, turning infrastructure into a policy constraint. Sovereignty means lowering lock-in and ensuring Europe can act without “permission-by-platform.”
Data sovereignty and privacy protection
If Europe can’t control jurisdiction, access, and data flows, it can’t reliably enforce its own rights regime. This is the foundation layer for trustworthy AI, public-sector digitization, and regulated industries.
Cybersecurity and infrastructure resilience
Without operational cyber resilience, sovereignty is performative. The point isn’t “no foreign tech,” but hardened systems, supply-chain assurance, and survivability under attack.
National security and defense autonomy
Defense increasingly depends on AI, secure compute, satellites, comms, chips, and cyber. Autonomy means Europe can deter and operate even when external supply or priorities shift.
Supply chain resilience in critical technologies
Chips, raw materials, energy systems, and manufacturing tools define whether Europe can build and sustain modern tech at scale. Resilience is about securing continuity under shocks, not about total self-sufficiency.
Strategic autonomy in geopolitics
Tech dependencies become geopolitical leverage (export controls, sanctions, vendor constraints). Sovereignty increases Europe’s freedom of action: Europe cooperates by choice, not necessity.
Economic competitiveness and innovation leadership
If Europe doesn’t build frontier capability (compute + talent + scale-up), it will remain a standards-taker and productivity laggard. Sovereignty is a competitiveness strategy: build the capabilities that set the pace.
Capturing economic value and jobs inside Europe
Using technology isn’t the same as owning the compounding assets (IP, platforms, distribution, learning loops). Sovereignty is about value capture: profits, jobs, and strategic control staying in Europe.
Shaping global standards and tech governance
Standards lock in architectures and markets for a decade. If Europe doesn’t lead key standards (AI eval, industrial data formats, cybersecurity certification, identity), it inherits others’ assumptions and rents.
Protecting European values and democracy
If the information environment and AI-mediated public discourse are governed by external actors, democratic resilience becomes contingent. Sovereignty here means enforceable governance: auditability, accountability, and protection against manipulation at scale.
Building public trust in technology
Trust determines adoption speed in government, healthcare, education, and finance. Sovereignty strengthens trust when it produces visible control: privacy-by-design, enforceable rules, and reliable public infrastructure (e.g., identity).
Aligning tech with sustainability and social goals
AI/cloud are energy- and resource-intensive; if Europe doesn’t steer infrastructure design, the digital transition can clash with climate goals and affordability. Sovereignty means Europe can optimize for its priorities (decarbonization, inclusion, resilience), not import someone else’s cost model.
Europe’s dependence on non-European platforms (cloud, AI stacks, operating systems, developer tooling, app ecosystems) converts core capabilities into external dependencies. In a crisis (trade conflict, sanctions, extraterritorial legal orders, geopolitical misalignment), dependency becomes a policy constraint: Europe may not be able to execute sovereign decisions without permission-by-infrastructure.
The European Commission’s State of the Digital Decade reporting notes that the EU relies on foreign countries for over 80% of digital products, services, infrastructure, and IP.
Cloud is the clearest example of concentration risk: the three US hyperscalers account for ~65% of the EU cloud market, while EU providers’ share fell to under ~16% (with the largest EU operator cited at only ~2%).
This is not just “market share”; it is dependency embedded into production (identity, security tooling, logs, workflow engines, pricing power, vendor lock-in).
Demand is exploding (AI workloads pull everything into cloud + GPUs), which reinforces hyperscaler advantage through scale economics.
Europe does have assets (industrial base, strong telcos, some sovereign-cloud initiatives), but readiness is uneven: the market is fragmented and procurement often rewards scale and incumbency rather than strategic resilience.
Public sector and regulated industries increasingly run on US-owned stacks (cloud + IAM + SIEM + data services), creating single points of failure and lock-in.
“Sovereign cloud” offerings frequently still depend on hyperscaler core technology, meaning sovereignty is partial (branding + hosting) rather than full-stack control.
Procurement as industrial policy: mandate “strategic autonomy criteria” (portability, exit costs, EU jurisdiction guarantees, auditability) in public procurement; give preference to EU providers where feasible while keeping interoperability requirements.
Portability + switching costs as a regulated metric: treat cloud lock-in like a competition issue; require standardized portability interfaces, mandatory export tools, and transparent egress pricing (competition enforcement + technical standards).
Build EU compute capacity as a public utility layer: accelerate EuroHPC AI Factories / gigafactory direction so European AI workloads can run on EU-controlled infrastructure.
Targeted scale-up of European cloud: pick a small set of EU “reference stacks” (sovereign IaaS/PaaS + identity + observability + secure storage) and fund them to reach credible scale (capacity, regions, compliance, developer experience).
European Commission top-level: Ursula von der Leyen (Commission President).
Tech sovereignty portfolio: Henna Virkkunen (Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy).
DG execution layer: DG CONNECT / Digital Services leadership.
Capital & scale: EIB President Nadia Calviño (critical for financing “EU-scale” infrastructure and industrial capacity).
Industrial leaders: Deutsche Telekom / OVHcloud / SAP (cloud), plus sectoral champions who can act as anchor customers.
If Europe doesn’t control key technologies, it becomes a price taker and platform dependent economy: value capture shifts to whoever owns the platforms, models, and core infrastructure. That translates into weaker productivity growth, reduced bargaining power in trade, and slower diffusion of frontier capabilities into the real economy.
The challenge is structural: the global “AI + cloud + semiconductor” stack is increasingly winner-take-most due to scale effects (data, compute, distribution). Europe’s reliance on foreign digital tech (again: 80%+) indicates the competitiveness risk is systemic, not marginal.
Europe has strong research, strong industrial domains (manufacturing, automotive, energy, health), and some emerging AI champions.
But two readiness gaps dominate:
scale-up gap (late-stage capital, fast go-to-market, unified market access),
compute gap (training/inference at frontier scale requires infrastructure Europe hasn’t yet matched—hence AI Factories / gigafactories focus).
Europe regulates AI and digital markets aggressively, but the innovation capacity (compute + capital + platform reach) still concentrates elsewhere; even Europe’s top AI startups publicly worry about compliance burdens and pace.
Public and private organizations often adopt “best-available” foreign tooling because local alternatives don’t match scale, reliability, or ecosystem pull (developers, integrations, managed services).
Pick battles where Europe can win: industrial AI, robotics/automation, energy systems, health regulation tech, multilingual productivity AI—then fund “EU lighthouse deployments” at scale.
Compute access as a competitiveness policy: make EuroHPC AI Factories a developer-facing capability (credits, tooling, model hubs) so startups can train/serve models without hyperscaler dependence.
Simplify and unify scale-up rules: create a true EU-wide “28th regime” style operating path (single corporate, tax, and employment frameworks for startups scaling across the EU), paired with aggressive reduction of administrative drag for SMEs (without weakening core safeguards).
EIB-backed “sovereignty deals”: debt + guarantees for compute, chips, and industrial AI deployments—turning sovereignty from slogans into bankable projects.
Commission leadership: von der Leyen + Virkkunen to align competitiveness with sovereignty.
National engines: France (Macron) and Germany (Chancellor Friedrich Merz) as the key political motors for EU-scale industrial policy.
Finance + execution: EIB (Calviño) as the scaling instrument; EuroHPC governance for compute rollout.
Even if Europe uses advanced technology, it doesn’t automatically capture the value. Value capture depends on who owns:
IP (models, chips, software),
platforms (cloud + app ecosystems),
distribution (enterprise relationships),
and the “learning loops” (data and usage feedback that improve products).
Without sovereignty, Europe risks turning into a high-end customer rather than an owner of compounding assets.
The EU cloud market is large and growing fast (partly due to AI), but dominance by non-EU hyperscalers means a big share of margins and strategic control accrues outside Europe.
This is the core “rent extraction” problem: Europe pays for critical services while its own firms struggle to reach scale.
Europe has meaningful strengths: deep industrial customers, world-class niche leaders, a strong regulatory environment for trust (which can be a market advantage).
Readiness problem: European firms often can’t compete on scale economics alone—so they need smart leverage: procurement, standards, federated infrastructure, and focus on defensible verticals.
Public money flows outward: governments and critical industries procure foreign cloud/AI solutions because they’re integrated, mature, and available now.
“Sovereign” layers without sovereignty: local hosting wrapped around foreign core stacks (still leaves strategic dependency and value leakage).
AI compliance load can disproportionately hit smaller European providers unless implementation is made pragmatic and supportive (sandboxes, guidance, templates).
Anchor customers at EU scale: large, multi-country procurement programs for EU providers (cloud, cybersecurity, AI tooling) with strict portability + security requirements—so EU firms get predictable demand and can invest.
Targeted vertical sovereignty: instead of generic “EU everything,” win the layers where Europe already has the customer base: industrial AI, regulated compliance stacks, multilingual public-sector assistants, secure health AI.
De-risk scale-up: EIB guarantees + blended finance for expansion, and EU-wide reference architectures to reduce integration costs.
Make regulation an advantage: use AI Act timelines and sandboxes to create a “trust brand” for European AI, while keeping implementation predictable and innovation-friendly.
Commission + sovereignty portfolio: Virkkunen for execution alignment across security, democracy, and tech sovereignty.
EIB + capital markets: Calviño to build “scale financing” that Europe historically lacked.
National-level industrial policy: Macron (France), Merz (Germany) as the core coalition to drive EU-wide procurement + infrastructure + simplification.
Industry champions (as builders + anchor customers): ASML (hardware ecosystem), SAP (enterprise distribution), Deutsche Telekom (cloud + networks), plus leading European AI firms highlighted by policymakers (e.g., Mistral, DeepL, Aleph Alpha).
Data is the “training fuel” for AI and the operating substrate for modern economies. If Europe can’t control where sensitive data lives, who can access it, and under which legal regime it’s processed, then Europe’s privacy model, industrial strategy, and security posture become partially contingent on foreign jurisdiction and foreign business incentives.
This is not just “privacy.” It’s a jurisdiction + cloud concentration + data-flow problem:
Jurisdiction: if the provider is under a non-EU legal regime, EU data can be exposed to extraterritorial access demands.
Concentration: cloud and platform dominance centralizes data gravity outside Europe (making switching harder, and enforcement weaker).
Data-flow: cross-border data movement becomes a structural dependency for health, finance, defense supply chains, and government services.
Europe is trying to address the market mechanics with “data economy” law. For example, the EU Data Act is applicable from 12 Sept 2025 and is positioned as a major step toward a fair EU data economy.
In health specifically, the European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation was published in March 2025 and entered into force 26 March 2025, starting a transition phase toward application.
Market conditions: data is increasingly tied to dominant cloud platforms and AI model providers; data portability is often theoretical because switching costs are real (identity, logs, integrations, proprietary services).
Readiness: Europe is strong in regulation and governance design (GDPR-era leadership), and it is building common-sector data frameworks (EHDS), but execution is uneven across member states and sectors.
Regulators and lawmakers constantly run into the same wall: “EU rules, non-EU stacks.” Enforcement becomes slow and political, not technical and routine.
Data-sharing initiatives (especially in health and public sector) move slowly because organizations don’t trust that sensitive data will remain under EU control—so adoption lags, and AI training datasets remain fragmented.
Make “jurisdictional control” a procurement requirement for critical workloads (health, defense, identity, core registries): mandatory EU legal control + independent auditability.
Force portability to become real: require measurable exit plans (time, cost, data formats, dependency mapping) as a condition for large public and regulated contracts; align with Data Act’s direction on cloud switching and interoperability.
Create EU-grade sector data utilities (starting with health, energy, manufacturing): shared reference architectures + shared consent/permissions + secure compute environments, so data can be used for AI without creating a single foreign “gravity well.”
European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS): Wojciech Wiewiórowski (as listed by EDPS).
EDPB Chair: Anu Talus (plus deputy chairs).
Commission leadership for tech sovereignty: Henna Virkkunen (Exec VP for Tech Sovereignty, Security & Democracy).
Sector leaders: major public health systems and regulators (EHDS), plus EU-scale cloud and cybersecurity providers as implementers.
If Europe can’t defend its networks and supply chains, sovereignty is mostly symbolic. Cybersecurity is the enabler of autonomy: secure infrastructure is what makes “EU control” credible under stress (crisis, sabotage, coercion).
The issue has three interacting layers:
Critical infrastructure exposure (energy, health, transport, public administration).
Supply-chain cyber risk (dependencies on software components, cloud services, managed security tooling).
Regulatory fragmentation (different levels of readiness and enforcement across member states and sectors).
The EU is actively evolving the framework. The Commission’s NIS2 policy page notes that on 20 Jan 2026 the Commission proposed targeted amendments to increase legal clarity and simplify compliance.
Market: attackers industrialize; defenders face talent shortages; compliance becomes expensive; and cloud concentration turns one vendor outage into systemic risk.
Readiness: Europe is relatively advanced on the regulatory scaffolding (NIS2 + certification), but operational maturity is uneven, especially outside finance/telecom.
Europe also has an EU-wide certification approach: ENISA describes EU cybersecurity certification as aiming to harmonize security assurance recognition across the Union.
Firms struggle to comply with NIS2 in multiple sectors; uneven national transposition and legacy infrastructure complicate implementation.
The EU cloud cybersecurity label debate (EUCS) shows the tension between “technical security certification” and “sovereignty expectations” (like localization/jurisdiction). Reuters reported industry groups urging adoption of an EUCS draft that was tweaked in ways seen as friendlier to major US cloud providers.
Operationalize NIS2: focus on measurable baseline controls (asset inventory, identity, segmentation, logging, incident response drills) with sector-specific playbooks; build “compliance accelerators” for SMEs.
EU-wide “secure-by-default” procurement: make certification + SBOM + vulnerability disclosure + patch SLAs mandatory for any supplier to critical entities; tie public contracts to demonstrated cyber maturity.
Cyber-resilience through diversity: reduce monoculture risk by requiring multi-region / multi-provider strategies for critical workloads and tested failover plans.
Scale European cyber industry: fund champions in identity security, endpoint, OT security, cloud security posture management, and threat intel—paired with EU procurement as anchor demand.
ENISA Executive Director: Juhan Lepassaar.
Commission tech sovereignty lead: Henna Virkkunen.
Implementation backbone: national cybersecurity authorities (e.g., NÚKIB in Czechia, BSI in Germany, ANSSI in France) aligned through ENISA frameworks.
Cloud certification governance: ENISA + Commission (EUCS discussions).
Defense autonomy is not “Europe goes alone.” It means Europe can deter, operate, sustain, and decide even if allies are distracted or priorities diverge. Tech sovereignty is now central to defense: ISR, satellites, comms, cyber, drones, semiconductors, and AI-enabled decision support.
The issue is a capability + industrial base + procurement fragmentation problem:
Capability: gaps in ammunition, air defense, drones, space resilience, cyber.
Industrial base: production capacity and supply-chain depth are insufficient for prolonged stress.
Procurement: many national systems, slow joint acquisition, limited standardization.
The EU’s Strategic Compass (approved 22 March 2022) is explicitly framed as an action plan with concrete objectives to strengthen EU security and defence policy by 2030.
Europe is also funding the defense industrial base: the European Defence Fund (EDF) has an overall budget of €7.953bn for 2021–2027 (EUR-Lex summary).
And defense industrial reinforcement is actively expanding (e.g., Reuters reported Parliament approval of the EDIP defense investment programme).
Market: security demand is up sharply since 2022; defense production is capacity-constrained; supply chains are globally interdependent.
Readiness: Europe has strong pockets (some world-class defense firms; space assets; strong R&D), but scale and speed are the bottlenecks. Joint procurement and industrial ramp-up are improving, but still behind the urgency curve.
Europe remains heavily dependent on non-EU suppliers for key platforms and components (and is constrained by allied export controls and political conditions).
Political debate persists over “buy European” vs “buy allied,” showing that autonomy is partially a governance and coalition issue, not just a technology issue.
Standardize + jointly procure at scale: build EU-wide reference requirements for drones, secure comms, counter-UAS, ammo, and air defense; commit to multi-year joint contracts so industry can invest.
Defense tech + dual-use acceleration: treat AI/cyber/space/robotics as dual-use accelerators; fast-track trials and procurement pathways for proven systems.
Industrial capacity ramp: use EDF + EDIP and national funds to expand manufacturing capacity, supply-chain depth, and component sourcing rules (with realistic allied exceptions where needed).
Secure compute for defense AI: create classified / sovereign compute zones (EU-controlled) for training and inference of defense-relevant models, with strict supply-chain assurance.
High Representative / Vice-President: Kaja Kallas (HR/VP).
Commissioner for Defence and Space: Andrius Kubilius.
European Defence Agency (EDA) Chief Executive: André Denk (listed by EU institutions).
Member-state “industrial motors”: France + Germany + Poland + Nordics/Baltics (capability urgency + industrial policy), working through EU instruments (EDF/EDIP/EDA).
If the information environment (platform rules, ranking algorithms, recommender systems, ad-tech, and now generative AI) is controlled by external actors, Europe’s democratic resilience becomes dependent on foreign corporate incentives and foreign political constraints. Tech sovereignty here is less about “owning everything” and more about ensuring governability: Europe must be able to enforce rules that protect citizens, elections, minors, and fundamental rights.
This is a systemic-risk problem: disinformation, manipulation, unsafe content, and opaque algorithmic influence are not isolated events—they are features of large-scale attention markets. The EU’s response is explicitly regulatory and institutional: the Digital Services Act (DSA) creates obligations and enforcement pathways for systemic risks on platforms.
AI adds a second layer: high-capability systems can generate persuasive content at scale and automate influence operations—so governance becomes inseparable from sovereignty.
Market: dominant platforms have global scale advantages; enforcement is complex because platforms are transnational and technically opaque.
Readiness: Europe is strong on “rules” and is building enforcement capacity. The DSA applies broadly (with phased scope), and the AI Act is now on a staged implementation timeline.
However, readiness is uneven across member states (regulators, capacity, coordination), and technical auditing capability is still catching up to platform complexity.
The DSA has moved from theory to concrete enforcement and tooling: the Commission released an age-verification blueprint designed to be privacy-preserving and interoperable with the future EU Digital Identity Wallet.
The EU is piloting practical mechanisms to protect minors and standardize compliance expectations across countries (a real example of “values translated into infrastructure”).
The AI Act timeline shows Europe choosing to regulate in phases rather than pause; key obligations start applying before full applicability.
Build “auditability infrastructure”: require verifiable logging, researcher-access interfaces, and standardized risk reporting for very large platforms; fund independent auditing capacity (labs + regulators + academia).
Treat safety tooling as shared European public goods: reference implementations for age verification, content provenance, and risk monitoring—so compliance doesn’t depend on each platform’s proprietary interpretation.
Make AI governance enforceable: create EU-grade testing and incident reporting for high-impact models; support “compliance kits” for SMEs so regulation doesn’t only advantage hyperscalers.
Henna Virkkunen (Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy).
Michael McGrath (Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection).
European Commission (DSA enforcement role) as the central actor for very large platforms + cross-border coordination.
Standards are geopolitical leverage. Whoever sets technical standards influences supply chains, interoperability, security norms, and often captures IP rents. If Europe doesn’t lead, it becomes a standards-taker, adopting others’ architectures, security assumptions, and licensing ecosystems.
Europe has explicit policy intent to lead globally on standards: the Commission published an EU Strategy on Standardisation focused on setting global standards for a resilient, green and digital Single Market.
The strategic battleground is widening: AI safety testing methods, cybersecurity certification, industrial data formats, 6G, post-quantum cryptography, and digital identity all have “standard-setting moments” that lock in trajectories for a decade.
Market: standards are shaped by consortium dynamics (industry coalitions, big-tech reference implementations, open-source dominance, and national security constraints).
Readiness: Europe is strong in regulated markets and has credible institutions (EU standardization bodies and the Commission’s policy leverage), but it often lacks the scale of platform ecosystems that push standards through adoption-by-default.
Europe tries to export governance via regulation (DSA/DMA/AI Act), and tries to export technical direction via standardisation strategy—but platform-layer defaults still frequently come from outside Europe.
The EU’s approach is increasingly: law + standards + certification as a combined sovereignty stack (rather than “industrial dominance only”).
Pick 5–7 “standard battlefronts” and over-invest (AI evaluation and red-teaming standards; industrial data spaces; cybersecurity certification for cloud; EU digital identity; post-quantum crypto; 6G security).
Fund reference implementations: standards win when developers can implement them cheaply; Europe should bankroll open, high-quality reference stacks that become global baselines.
Tie standards to procurement: require conformance to EU-led standards in public and regulated procurement to create immediate market pull (standards become adoption, not just documents).
Stéphane Séjourné (Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy; Industry, SMEs and the Single Market).
Ekaterina Zaharieva (Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation) to align R&D and tech diffusion with standard leadership.
European standardisation organisations (CEN/CENELEC/ETSI) as the execution layer—plus Commission coordination through the standardisation strategy.
If Europe cannot secure critical inputs (chips, raw materials, energy systems, key manufacturing tools), then its digital and green transitions are contingent—vulnerable to shocks, coercion, export controls, and strategic scarcity. Sovereignty here means continuity of capability under stress.
Europe has moved from “efficiency supply chains” to “security supply chains.” Three major legal/industrial pillars illustrate the scale:
European Chips Act entered into force 21 Sept 2023.
Critical Raw Materials Act entered into force 23 May 2024.
Net-Zero Industry Act entered into force 29 June 2024.
Reality check: Europe’s chip ambitions have faced major scrutiny; the European Court of Auditors assessed the microchip strategy and flagged that targets are unlikely at current trajectory.
Industry and governments are already pushing “Chips Act 2.0” (including an all-EU Dutch-led Semicon Coalition).
Market: capital intensity is huge; time-to-build is long; global subsidies (US/China/Asia) are aggressive; and talent bottlenecks are real.
Readiness: Europe has exceptional nodes (ASML, strong power electronics, industrial engineering), but scaling manufacturing and securing materials are the hard parts. Policy is now aligned—but execution speed and coordination remain the limiting factors (per the auditors’ critique and industry calls).
Projects stall or shift when subsidy approvals, permitting, or energy constraints collide with global competition; Europe remains exposed to external cycles and decisions.
The EU is increasingly writing resilience into industrial policy (NZIA’s intent to boost domestic net-zero manufacturing; CRMA to secure materials), showing the sovereignty logic is now mainstream rather than fringe.
Stop pretending one metric wins (e.g., “20% of global chips”): reframe toward critical capability assurance (power chips, sensors, secure supply for defense/energy/industry) + targeted advanced nodes where feasible.
Permit-and-build acceleration: single fast-track pathways for fabs, grid upgrades, and net-zero manufacturing (NZIA logic), with pre-approved sites and standard environmental compliance templates.
Materials security as a system: expand EU recycling + refining + substitution R&D; sign long-term offtake agreements; build strategic reserves where appropriate (CRMA intent).
Chips Act 2.0 focused on the full stack: not only fabs—also design, materials, equipment, packaging, and workforce (exactly what industry has been calling for).
Stéphane Séjourné (industry, SMEs, single market) as the industrial-policy integrator.
Ekaterina Zaharieva (research + innovation) for the long-cycle pipeline: materials, packaging, next-gen manufacturing methods.
Dan Jørgensen (Energy and Housing) because supply-chain resilience now depends on grid capacity, energy price stability, and secure energy systems (fabs and AI compute are energy-constrained industries).
Member-state coalitions like the Semicon Coalition (political momentum + funding alignment).
Tech dependence becomes foreign-policy dependence. “Open strategic autonomy” is explicitly about the EU’s ability to make its own choices while staying open and engaged internationally.
This is a leverage problem: if critical compute, cloud, chips, or security tooling sit under non-EU jurisdiction, then export controls, sanctions, or vendor restrictions can indirectly constrain EU policy options. It also shows up as research-security risk (malign influence, dual-use leakage) and “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” cooperation.
Markets for frontier AI and advanced semiconductors are increasingly strategic and policy-shaped (subsidies, export controls, national security reviews).
Europe is building a governance stance (“open but safe”), but readiness is uneven across Member States and sectors.
Europe is pressured to align with allies’ tech controls and regulatory expectations, while simultaneously trying to maintain competitiveness and avoid dependency traps.
The Commission is explicitly tying “tech sovereignty” to security and democracy mandates at the top of the College.
Dependency mapping as a security discipline: require critical sectors to maintain a live “strategic dependency register” (compute, cloud, identity, chips, comms) with tested contingency plans.
Alliance-compatible sovereignty: build EU capabilities (compute, cyber, identity, key chip supply) while designing interoperability with trusted partners—so Europe can cooperate by choice, not necessity.
Research security playbooks: standardize due diligence, access controls, and safe collaboration pathways across EU R&I programs to keep cooperation open but protected.
Kaja Kallas (High Representative / Vice-President).
Henna Virkkunen (Exec VP for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy).
Andrius Kubilius (Commissioner for Defence and Space).
Stéphane Séjourné (Exec VP for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy).
Separately, Eurobarometer-reported trust in the EU reached 52% (highest since 2007) in a 2025 poll—useful political capital for major tech transitions.
Market incentives don’t naturally optimize for trust; they optimize for growth, engagement, and cost.
Europe’s comparative advantage is credible institutions + rule-of-law governance—if translated into usable infrastructure, not only legislation.
Identity, age verification, and cross-border authentication are flashpoints: people want digital convenience but fear surveillance and misuse.
Europe is trying to institutionalize trust via the EU Digital Identity Framework, which entered into force on 20 May 2024, and requires Member States to offer at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet by 2026.
Trust-by-architecture: require privacy-preserving defaults (data minimization, selective disclosure, strong encryption) for identity, wallets, and AI systems used in public services.
Visible enforcement + clarity: publish clear compliance playbooks and run high-credibility audits (especially for high-impact AI and very large platforms), so trust comes from evidence, not promises.
Make trustworthy options competitive: public procurement should reward demonstrable trust properties (auditability, transparency, portability, EU-jurisdiction controls), creating market pull for “trust-grade” European vendors.
Henna Virkkunen (tech sovereignty + democracy mandate).
National digital identity / eIDAS implementers (interior/digital ministries) as delivery owners for wallets by 2026.
Eurobarometer + Commission services as the feedback loop (measure trust/adoption and adjust policy).
AI and cloud are becoming energy- and resource-intensive. If Europe can’t steer infrastructure design, the digital transition can undermine climate goals and increase energy vulnerability. Sovereignty here means the ability to optimize for EU priorities (decarbonisation, resilience, inclusion) rather than importing someone else’s cost model.
Data centres already represent about 3% of EU electricity consumption, and demand is expected to rise sharply due to AI workloads.
Europe maintains an EU Code of Conduct framework with best-practice guidelines for data-centre energy efficiency (updated regularly, including 2024 and 2025 editions).
Market push: hyperscale AI drives rapid buildout; energy and grid constraints become binding.
Readiness: Europe has strong policy tools and technical guidance (JRC best practices), but faces permitting, grid, and cost constraints, plus local opposition to new builds.
The EU is preparing an energy-efficiency policy package for data centres, explicitly motivated by AI-driven load growth.
Increasing tension between “build more compute fast” vs “keep electricity affordable + meet climate targets.”
Sovereign compute with green constraints: make new AI compute capacity conditional on energy-efficiency best practices, heat reuse, and clean power sourcing—using the EU Code of Conduct best-practice baseline as an operational standard.
Grid-first industrial policy: treat grid upgrades and permitting as the critical path for AI competitiveness (fast-track connection, flexibility markets, local generation).
Social-value targeting: prioritize AI deployment where Europe gets outsized social ROI (health system productivity, education tooling across EU languages, public admin automation) and measure outcomes publicly to sustain legitimacy.
Dan Jørgensen (EU Energy Commissioner) as a key actor on the data-centre energy package and broader energy constraints of AI infrastructure.
Stéphane Séjourné (industrial strategy; sovereignty in crucial sectors/technologies).
JRC / Commission technical capability (EU Code of Conduct best-practice program as an implementation spine).
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