The Italian economist Cristina Caffarra calls Europe a ‘digital colony of the United States’. To change that, she founded Eurostack a year and a half ago. She is heard: more and more countries are taking action.

Can the European Union emancipate itself from US technologies?

IT companies call for concerted action against US dominance: “Golden opportunity”

Interviews with hashtag#HiPEAC26 keynote speakers Michaela Blott on tailoring compute to AI workloads, with Frank Karlitschek on digital sovereignty, and with Deming Chen on the impact AI is having on hardware.

How the EU became a digital colony — and how it might break free

Experts: Sweden is stuck in US cloud services

Funding Open Source for Digital Sovereignty

The EU is a “digital colony of the US” This Italian is trying to change that with some success

EuroStack: Stop regulation and start building now!

Who Controls Europe’s Data? Inside the Battle for Digital Sovereignty

Tagesspiegel: Who shaped the year 2025

Time for Europe to stop making excuses and step up: EuroStack’s Caffarra

Can Europe Build Digital Sovereignty While Safeguarding Its Rights Legacy?

Get over your X: A European plan to escape American technology

The woman behind EU leaders’ big plan: “Regulation of tech has been a disaster”

“Europe must go its own digital way”

At the summit on Europe’s digital sovereignty, Chancellor Merz spoke out in favour of placing greater emphasis on European capabilities in the digital space. Together with French President Macron, he called for a joint effort.

Germany and France agree: Now the EU must be free of American tech

Paris and Berlin unite behind sovereign European cloud push

The European summit in Berlin offers the opportunity to leave the theoretical debates on “digital sovereignty” behind in order to finally get into action. Because what is needed now is obvious.

The EU announces a €180 million tender that partially takes on board EuroStack’s proposal: it is an opportunity to understand what the initiative consists of and what the state of the art is: here are all the details

EuroStack Foundation: a new step towards concrete European digital sovereignty

Europe eyes digital sovereignty sans big tech

Cristina Caffarra from Eurostack: “Europe must stop blaming others”

More than 300 IT firms and organisations working together for digital European sovereignty

Nextcloud, Proton & Co: New Alliance for Digital Sovereignty

EuroStack initiative sets up a non-profit advocacy organisation

EuroStack advocates welcome Commission’s sovereign cloud framework, call for more

Lobbyists for European sovereign cloud providers have welcomed the Commission’s new Sovereign Cloud Framework, which is tied to a €180 million tender, but called for stronger measures in the EU’s upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA).

The six-year tender, worth €30 million annually, aims to guide EU institutions’ cloud procurement. Antitrust expert Cristina Caffarra and Bertelsmann Stiftung director Martin Hullin – both keen advocates of building out European digital sovereignty – told Euractiv that the move was “a start” and “a step in the right direction”, respectively.

Hullin said the sovereignty score will “certainly inform” the upcoming CAIDA proposal, expected by spring 2026, as it will include a definition of sovereign cloud. But he suggested refining the score to make it “more precise” through qualitative rather than quantitative criteria.

As for the Caffarra-led EuroStack sovereign digital infrastructure initiative, a “sequential, gated approach” using EU jurisdiction as a pass/fail test would be a better approach than the Commission’s “flexible scoring system”, it wrote on social media.

SUSE and Exoscale in push for European cloud sovereignty

agendadigitale.eu – EU digital sovereignty, how it is achieved: the ecosystem for the turning point

The EuroStack initiative

This initiative is coordinated by a strictly non-lobbying informal group (and therefore without personal profit objectives or as an organization) by some entrepreneurs, exponents of the digital sector, technology specialists, economists and consultants who contribute in a personal capacity as volunteers. Cristina Caffarra, one of the founders of the initiative, already a partisan expert in some of the largest digital antitrust disputes and now the animator of EuroStack, describes it as “the one and only one shared by companies in the sector rather than led by governments or public administrations in collaboration with universities and research centers”.

EuroStack proposes an alternative to the approach to the digital market that the European Union has developed in recent decades, based on antitrust and regulation. This approach, if it was ever possible, according to EuroStack has demonstrated its failure in practice: today the vast majority of the European digital infrastructure is under the control of external companies, mainly American, which at any time could decide for their own reasons or, worse, be forced by their own government, to limit their services, modify them in a way contrary to the interests of the market and European governments or, brutally deny them to European customers and consumers.

EuroStack’s proposal, “so refreshing” for many public and private operators and now adopted by many European digital operators, is simple and is addressed both to the European Commission and to the companies themselves.

• EuroStack asks the Commission to immediately guarantee a public demand, and progressively a private one: a Buy European! program like those that other political-economic blocs adopt, and with them often the states of the European Union themselves, perhaps informally, to the advantage of each of their national operators.
  This programme can easily and quickly create a market for solutions, which are already in many cases effective and advanced today, from EU operators, and the incentive to develop them further, bringing them up to the level of global competitors when they are not already.
• As for companies, EuroStack urges them to “raise their heads” (“grow a spine”, says Caffarra), leveraging the large reserves of entrepreneurial and technological skills, and capital, that Europe, still rich today, continues to export to more profitable markets and continents.

With EuroStack, therefore, more and more European companies stop complaining about the shortcomings of the single market and the inadequate application of antitrust rules, and to ask for structural funds, funding for research and innovation projects or tax relief, to claim instead a space on the market, progressively sacrificed in recent years in homage to an opening to global markets and free competition that is often formal or even apparent.

In recent months, the initiative has progressed in two main directions:

Even more important, for Caffarra, is that entrepreneurs are taking action with their own resources and investments to create cutting-edge solutions capable of establishing themselves on the market, of which they can then propose preferential purchase by public administrations. An international example close to us is that of SECA API, the standard for managing digital assets with European sovereignty in a homogeneous way between different countries and suppliers, launched by Dynamo, Aruba and IONOS described above and in this previous article.

In their relationship with the institutions, the founders began working with the ministers for innovation and digital of the main European countries, as well as with the Commission. Some, such as those in France, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, are taking up the idea and starting to implement it in their countries.
The new German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport, in particular, announced a real Deutschland-Stack for 2028 in June 2025.

Europe Fights for AI Independence to Avoid Becoming Tech ‘Colony’

EuroStack demands hard criteria for ‘real’ digital sovereignty

SUSE has announced its accession to EuroStack, “a European industrial policy initiative that brings together technology, governance and financing for European-focused investment to build and adopt a suite of digital infrastructures: from connectivity to cloud computing, AI and digital platforms”.

For Digital Competition, Antitrust and Regulation are ‘Small Ball.’ What Matters is Infrastructure.

Eurostack initiative makes proposals for “Buy European”

2025 barometer on the economic and social performance of French start-ups, venture capital funds and support structures

Eurostack’s proposed “Buy European” framework puts its foot in the dish of Europe’s digital dependence on foreign technology providers. It puts on the table a common regulatory framework in terms of technical, operational and data governance and sovereignty, and calls on the European Commission at the highest level.

VIRKKUNEN WRITES TO EP ON AI, DMA: The European Commission is closely watching how search engines and social media are integrating AI in their services, executive veep Henna Virkkunen said in a letter to lawmakers seen by Morning Tech dated Sept. 24.

When tech platforms do this, “they need to ensure compliance with the applicable obligations under the DMA, such as the provisions concerning processing, combining, or cross-using personal data, or the obligation to enable changing of default services, including embedded AI,” Virkkunen wrote.

Backing the Eurostack: Virkkunen added that the institution “will work towards the realization of the Eurostack, supporting open-source and decentralized technologies with strong investment in R&D and the development of alternative digital solutions to ensure that Europe can compete globally,” the letter also said.

NOW READ THIS: Virkkunen was in Estonia yesterday, where she visited Pactum AI, which develops AI agents that can handle negotiations with suppliers. At first glance Pactum is a rare European AI success worthy of a visit of the EU’s tech chief who’s keen to show Europe can keep up in the AI race.

At second glance, though… Pactum AI Inc. is incorporated in the U.S. and headquartered in Mountain View (the home base of Google), its website says. Did somebody in Virkkunen’s team think about the optics of this before they planned the visit?

Pactum said: “While Pactum is headquartered in California, it proudly maintains its Estonian roots through its offices there,” in a statement to Morning Tech. Noted.

Making the case for a third AI technology stack

An initiative shows how the EU could stand on its own two feet digitally – and is getting help from Trump. Is he driving Europe towards independence?

Eurostack: Between movement and standstill

Europe Cannot Wait to Fight Trump’s Assault on Democracy

Europe’s ‘happy vassal’ complex 

Sustainable digitalisation 2025 is aimed at practitioners and decision-makers who are active in different roles, primarily in municipalities, regions and authorities within various organizations in Sweden.

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We will never get European champions like that

EuroStack: reversing the trend, urgently

The return of Donald Trump revives the debate on digital sovereignty

Between Tariffs and Tech: What Will Europe Choose?

European Digital Sovereignty is an Industrial Project.  Everyone Else Get Out of the Way.

Europe is at a crossroads.
The growing dominance of non-European tech giants doesn’t just raise economic concerns, it puts our digital sovereignty and data protection at risk. Governments and public administrations face a critical choice: Will they support digital independence, or deepen their reliance on external providers?

The battle for the clouds: Evroc in the midst of Europe’s IT awakening

Dependence on American cloud services should be reduced, according to Minister of Civil Affairs Erik Slottner (KD), who is presenting a new cloud policy. But he does not agree with Gunnar Hökmark’s criticism: “It shoots from the hip,” says Slottner.

Trump can pull the plug on the internet, and Europe can’t do anything about it

Commission eyes ditching Microsoft Azure for France’s OVHcloud over digital sovereignty fears

Sweden must stop floating in other people’s clouds

In Munich, early signs of a European hyperscaler revolt

Digital sovereignty: Europe must offer an incisive and pragmatic approach

Wise message from the government on digital sovereignty, but more EU is needed

With this plan, Europe wants to break away from America’s big tech

With Margrethe Vestager as one of the front figures, the EU has been too preoccupied with regulating other countries’ tech giants, but neglected Europe’s own tech industry. An ambitious initiative wants to change that.

“EuroStack”: How Europe Can Compete in Tech

Digital sovereignty: How can Europe become less dependent on Big Tech?

Expert on Sweden’s IT dependence on the US: The government must wake up now

For a sovereign European cloud, the turning point can come from public tenders

We are Millions More Than the US – what’s the problem?

Europe needs digital sovereignty

A movement calling on Europe not to become a “digital colony” is of great interest to Switzerland

Don’t let Trump threaten our data

A cloud made in Europe against the Big tech monopoly

Digital sovereignty is more than a change of flag

EuroStack’s sovereignty stack gains media edge

Europe wants to free itself from US tech. Can it?

EuroStack: The CNLL welcomes concrete proposals for a European digital sovereignty based on Open Source and interoperability

Tech: we must “buy European” to avoid being a “digital colony”, argues the Eurostack collective

A coherent European/non-US cloud strategy: building railroads for the cloud economy

Notes on the EuroStack White Paper

DRIVING THE DAY

PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS: The tech experts and economists behind the EuroStack initiative are doubling down on their call for European policymakers to drastically reduce dependence on U.S. technology, just weeks before the European Commission is expected to acknowledge that such decoupling is “unrealistic.”

The backstory: The EuroStack is an industrial policy initiative — increasingly supported by European industry — that aims at making Europe self-reliant in digital infrastructure, all the way through to software, which has been overwhelmingly dominated by a handful of U.S. players. The €300 billion project is gaining steam in Brussels as the transatlantic relationship has hit a low point, even prompting Microsoft’s top executive to respond to concerns that U.S. President Donald Trump could pull the plug on American providers in Europe.

In a new report out today — which Morning Tech had an early peek at — the authors, including antitrust economist Cristina Caffarra, urge the EU to put their vision on track through three guiding mottos: “Buy European,” “Sell European,” and “Fund European.”

“European governments and institutions spending public money should have an obligation to invest in Europe’s economic future,” they write in an open letter to the Commission alongside the report.

In practical terms, they suggest using the leverage of public procurement (i.e. an EU preference) and introducing European quotas for purchases by public bodies to help the bloc’s ecosystem grow; setting up a “EuroStack” funding vehicle; and supporting interoperability and openness as Europe’s USP.

“There is nothing exceptional in this approach: these industrial policy tools have been widely used in other jurisdictions, including the US, for decades — as large public contracts powered the growth of today’s tech giants,” the letter says.

“Europe has the talent and resources to become a world leader in technologies.” This is how the startup ecosystem confronts politicians, investors and entrepreneurs in Brussels

DRIVING THE DAY

PARLIAMENT TO LAUNCH EURO-TECH SUPPORT GROUP: Several European lawmakers from different groups are set to give a timely boost to the movement to build European alternatives to U.S. tech. The “Democratic Tech Alliance” will launch next week, Maltese Social Democrat lawmaker Alex Agius Saliba told our colleague Jacob Parry.

The cross-party group includes tech-minded lawmakers such as Alexandra Geese of the Greens, Axel Voss from the conservative European People’s Party and Nathalie Loiseau of Renew, he said. The grouping will hold its first meeting on Wednesday.

Prioritize this: The group wants to ensure the Commission prioritizes building European competitors to the dominant U.S.-owned platforms, Geese told Jacob — says Europe urgently needs “democratic” alternatives to the incumbent social media platforms and AI firms.

Saliba roots the proposal in the oft-floated idea of a “Eurostack” that could lessen the EU’s dependency on the Big Tech oligarchy. This will be an important stream of the group’s work.

Eurostack on track: The idea of a Eurostack has steadily gained traction over the past year, first as a theoretical idea to ensure Europe is less reliant on U.S. technology in three layers (hardware, cloud services, and applications) and then as a more urgent need as EU-U.S. relations deteriorated.

Saliba said Europe would be “missing the wood for the trees” if it didn’t pursue Europe-grown digital infrastructure, linking the need for more European tech solutions to Wednesday’s fines against Apple and Meta. “It would be useless to impose fines if we cannot provide alternatives,” he said.

It’s not unexpected: The Parliament’s support for homegrown alternatives to the GAFAM (Google, Apple Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) is not surprising; some of the signatories have been supporting the movement for a while now, either behind the scenes or publicly.

Both Geese and Kai Zenner, Axel Voss’s parliamentary assistant, were part of a group that organized a conference on the matter in the Parliament in September last year.

Countries and companies, too: Support for the Eurostack is also brewing elsewhere. In March, a group of companies including defense heavyweights such as Airbus and Dassault sent a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to push for more home-made technology.

The recent German coalition deal mentioned the need for a “Germany Stack.”

IN OTHER APPLE NEWS: The FT reports Friday morning that the tech giant wants to source all U.S. iPhones from India in a pivot away from China amid President Donald Trump’s tariff war.

Trump’s threat could be the boost Swedish companies have been waiting for

An industrial initiative, a sort of “Airbus of data and the cloud”, wants to federate European digital forces to exist in the face of the American giants.

EuroStack: the initiative that wants to give Europe a place in the cloud

Services such as Microsoft Office and Google Drive may become illegal to use in the EU – after Trump fired data monitors. “If it falls, it happens immediately. Bang, boom,” says expert Carl Heath.

Here’s everything you need to know about Eurostack

Von der Leyen expresses timid support for Eurostack tech sovereignty project

European industry big win: Germany, France both support sovereign EU-based tech infrastructure

Free software: a European security issue

Europe’s digital sovereignty and military reconstruction must go hand in hand

Excited to share version 1 of our new paper on the Economics of Digital Public Infrastructure. This work provides a conceptual framework for thinking about how to measure the ways infrastructure creates value.

Choice of alternative suppliers, regulations, possible new initiatives, such as a “Buy European Act”, are all avenues that were explored at La Tribune’s Tech for Future Forum on 1 April.

Can Trump paralyze European companies? “We are on the drip of the tech billionaires”

Europe has become totally dependent on American cloud services. Since Trump’s election, that feels like an immediate danger, but is there anything that can be done about it?

“European industry and governments have been naively transferring all their data to the American cloud over the past five years,” says Kurt Jonckheer, CEO of the Belgian software company Klarrio and a champion of a European cloud for years. The ‘cloud’ is computer servers and storage systems that are always available and can be located anywhere in the world. They are increasingly replacing the computer rooms of companies and governments.

According to figures from Synergy Research, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the so-called ‘hyperscalers’, together account for 70 percent of the cloud market in Europe and that share is rising. No European player gets more than 2 percent. The cloud is more than just computing power. The American providers in particular promise companies and governments that they can meet all their needs, with software for everything from word processing to communication and accounting. Even larger European players such as the Swiss Exoscale or the French OVHcloud cannot present the same total offer. Microsoft’s Azure offerings also include Word, Outlook, Teams and the accounting software Dynamics, in addition to all kinds of AI services including OpenAI’s language models. Consumers are also affected by the cloud: most of the apps used by a European run on the infrastructure of the American hyperscalers. Netflix, for example, relies on Amazon’s AWS.

This has led to increasing concerns about the confidentiality and security of data in recent years. On the basis of the Patriot Act of 2001 (immediately after the attacks of September 11), the US is appropriating far-reaching access to data of foreign companies and individuals. But for several months now, there has also been another, more urgent fear in Europe: that President Donald Trump may well force, by decree, American companies to eliminate European governments or companies. For example, to put pressure on Denmark to cede Greenland.

“Five to twelve”

The advance of the American cloud has been going on for twenty years, but has now gained momentum. “Belgium relies entirely on the American cloud,” says Jonckheer. “The entire Belgian industry, all data, all intellectual property … Everything has moved to the cloud and the companies have phased out their own infrastructure, believing that they will be easier and cheaper off.”

Belgium is certainly no exception. The Dutch government is becoming increasingly dependent on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. In that country, this has now become a political priority. Last week, the House of Representatives passed motions calling for the government to phase out the use of American cloud services and to create its own Dutch cloud.

“It’s five to twelve,” said Barbara Kathmann of GroenLinks-PvdA in the House of Representatives. “The world is upside down. The president and vice president of the United States are actually saying out loud that they don’t care about Europe. They are out to demolish our tech sector and undermine our laws. Big tech is happily joining in, with their CEOs in the front row to take advantage of the chaos. And our government is on the drip of those same tech billionaires. We are totally dependent on Microsoft, Google and Amazon.”

EuroStack

In Europe, the subject is high on the agenda. Since 1 November, the European Union has had a European Commissioner for Technological Sovereignty: Henna Virkkunen from Finland. Last week, a group of about a hundred European technology companies sent an open letter to Virkkunen and to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. It advocated the EuroStack, a European alternative to the American all-in-one cloud. There is a lot of support for the idea in the European Parliament.

“The Americans buy American, the Chinese buy Chinese,” says Italian economist and antitrust expert Cristina Caffarra, one of the driving forces behind EuroStack. “Let’s make an effort to buy European.” She accuses the Europeans of “laziness” by choosing American suppliers. What she actually means by that: puzzling everything together with a motley crew of European suppliers will require much more effort.

For the time being, this EuroStack is little more than an infographic that lists countless European product names – such as the Ecosia search engine, the Nextcloud office software (both from Germany), on top of the cloud servers of companies such as OVHcloud. But the intention is that combining these components will eventually become (almost) as easy as opting for an American hyperscaler.

Europe is now too vulnerable, says Caffarra. She cites the example of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. That runs on Microsoft’s cloud services. But Trump is anything but a fan of the institution. “How hard is it to imagine that the supplier suddenly says: sorry, but the president has ordered us to terminate the contract?” asks Caffarra.

Something like EuroStack is “unfortunately fiction,” says Jonckheer of Klarrio. “The idea is right, but in Europe there are too many of these fragmented initiatives without sufficient critical mass.” An earlier, similar initiative, Gaia-X, yielded little. The European Commission has also been considering a series of standards for secure cloud services, EUCS, for years, with no clear prospect of results.

The servers of the American hyperscalers are often located in Europe. But that offers no guarantee, say proponents of the European cloud. The American Cloud Act, passed in 2018 during Trump’s first term in office, gives the US government the right to demand all data on the servers of American companies – including on European territory.

Regulation

Europe has tried in vain in recent decades to curb the advance of big tech. A series of major antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Google, among others, had to prevent those companies from becoming too dominant. “Those things have not changed anything on the ground,” says Caffarra. “Such a process took too long, ten years from start to finish.” Over the past five years, Europe has tried to do things differently: with regulations that banned certain actions by the big tech companies in advance. This was to ensure that European companies could continue to compete. “But the reality of regulation is that there is a huge gap between the resources of those companies and the regulator.” The handful of lawyers of the Commission cannot win a technical argument against the gigantic teams of engineers of big tech.

Moreover, the regulation had the wrong approach, according to Caffarra. Above all, Europe wanted to guarantee that European players have access to the platforms of the American giants, such as Apple’s app store or the Google search engine, so that they can offer services on top of that. But soon there was no longer a viable alternative to those platforms. Moreover, European technology companies complain that all these European rules are costing them a lot of money.

“We are losing knowledge”

If there is one Flemish technology company that still plays a role on a global scale, it is Imec. CEO Luc Van den hove warns that Europe should not react emotionally to the current turmoil, but “in a calculated way, proportionally and effectively, with a view to the long term”. “We have to support Europe’s strengths,” he believes, “and we don’t do that by cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world. It is an illusion to think that Europe could become completely independent of foreign technology from America and Asia. And it would be a huge threat to the development of our own position. We must ensure that we remain an indispensable part of the value chain.”

Can companies still break free from the American cloud? “Everything is possible, but it will be expensive,” says Jonckheer. Caffarra hopes that the European Union would support companies in the transition to a European cloud, as is happening for the transition to clean tech. According to her, that does not have to cost too much. But the initiators of EuroStack themselves calculated that it will take ten years and 300 billion euros to realize EuroStack.

And there is a hurry, says Jonckheer. “The risk of shipping everything to the American cloud is that you lose the necessary knowledge internally. The longer one waits, the more difficult it becomes to turn back the clock.”

Europe’s digital leaders to call for breaking tech dependencies

Europe’s leading digital economies are expected to call for the bloc to “mitigate strategic dependencies and control key strategic positions” in the global technology supply chain, in a meeting on Thursday.

The European Union needs a strategy that increases “the EU’s tech sovereignty in an open manner,” said an undated draft of a declaration of the “D9+” group of countries, seen by POLITICO. To do so, it “needs to strengthen its technological capabilities as well as its trade relations,” it added.

The D9+ group is a group of countries that see themselves as digital frontrunners. Ministers of the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Belgium and Finland will meet on Thursday in Amsterdam for a meeting of the forum. The European Commission’s Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen is also planning to attend.

Countries are expected to argue that the EU should boost the development of European artificial intelligence, cloud and connectivity.

They added that the EU’s tech rulebooks should not “hinder the development and use of technology by innovative European companies” — a line that echoes the EU’s concerns and loud U.S. criticism that European tech laws are stifling growth.

The draft didn’t detail which countries would sign up to the final declaration. It could still change ahead of Thursday’s meeting.

Pressure has been building for the EU to reduce its reliance on the U.S. and build up a European technology infrastructure in light of worsening EU-U.S. relations.

Two weeks ago, up to 100 companies including defense heavyweights Airbus and Dassault sent a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that said the EU should be “more technologically independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure.”

EuroStack, the plan for a Europe independent of Big Tech

Trump’s Aggression Sours Europe on US Cloud Giants

100 startups ask the EU for digital autonomy: “It has become a geopolitical urgency”

Dutch parliament calls for end to dependence on US software companies

PC and tablet market impacted by Donald Trump’s tariff hikes

EuroStack: tech players call for a leap of European sovereignty

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Europe’s IT industry wants the EU to act – “must become more technologically independent”

Defense giants want von der Leyen to boost made-in-Europe tech. European industrial and tech firms want the EU’s backing to reduce reliance on the U.S.

European tech industry coalition calls for ‘radical action’ on digital sovereignty — starting with buying local

European tech companies urge the EU to help in building up sovereignty. 95 European tech companies and organisations have signed an open letter addressed to the Commission.

Airbus leads call for Europe to create sovereign infrastructure fund, buy European

Europe wants to get in on big tech — here’s why that could be good for everyone

European companies call for “Buy European”

European companies in open letter to the EU: “We must break out of the lock-in”

Tech support

“Proton, Airbus and dozens of other European businesses and associations are urging Brussels to invest more in the bloc’s digital infrastructure, writes Barbara Moens.

Context: Europe is waking up to its heavy reliance on American digital infrastructure and services. Just as the bloc wants to invest more in its own security and economic competitiveness, there are growing calls to focus on tech sovereignty, for which digital infrastructure is key.

“Europe needs to recover the initiative and become more independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure,” the businesses and associations wrote in a letter to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and its tech chief Henna Virkkunen, seen by the Financial Times.

“Time is of the essence and industry is prepared to invest if there are conditions for viable returns,” they added.

The groups are pushing for a “sovereign infrastructure fund” to support areas such as quantum computing and chips, which require high investments. They also argue that public investment should focus on European producers, helping to boost demand for EU tech suppliers.

The letter follows a series of earlier initiatives to support Europe becoming more self-reliant when it comes to digital and tech, such as Eurostack, which aims to create a European tech infrastructure.

However, critics argue such initiatives are costly and time-intensive and that the bloc is better off focusing on a number of specific tech industries where it has a better chance to catch up, such as artificial intelligence.”

Politico Morning Tech – DRIVING THE DAY

HERE FIRST — COMPANIES ASK VON DER LEYEN FOR EUROPEAN TECH EFFORT: Dozens of European companies, including heavyweights like Airbus and Dassault, are pressing the European Commission to make Europe more technologically sovereign.

In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and tech boss Henna Virkkunen, seen by Morning Tech exclusively ahead of its public release this morning, the companies say Europe needs to be “more technologically independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure.”

Strained ties: The companies cite the Munich Security Conference — where U.S. Vice President JD Vance gave a speech that chilling to many European ears — as well as “subsequent” U.S. measures and other developments in the transatlantic relationship as reasons for their request.

The firms argue that Europe should step up its technological game regarding physical infrastructure (such as microchips, computing capabilities and data storage capacity) and the applications and platforms that run on top of that hardware.

Eurostack debate heats up: The plea is music to the ears of advocates of a Eurostack, the idea of building out a core European tech infrastructure across three layers (hard infrastructure, intermediary services such as cloud services, and applications) and reduce Europe’s many dependencies on U.S. Big Tech.

What do they want from Brussels? The Commission needs to “mobilize industry” for a “continent-wide strategy” to make Europe more digitally sovereign, the letter reads.

Some of the more specific demands are a “Buy European” requirement for governments to prop up demand for companies (which would allow them to invest), harmonized industry standards and a “sovereign infrastructure fund” to support investments in more capital-intensive industries, such as chips and quantum technology.

Who is asking this? Among the signatories are Airbus, the French public investment bank Bpifrance; European cloud companies including Scaleway, OVHCloud, and Nextcloud, several tech industry alliances including France Digital, the European Digital SME Alliance, and Connect Europe, and smaller European tech companies like Proton and Ecosia.

Hear from a signatory: Morning Tech caught up with Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, one of the letter’s signatories.

“I don’t think the goal is to be completely independent from the U.S. or the rest of the world … but at least have some assets so that we can at least negotiate,” Karlitschek said.

Karlitschek urged Brussels to enforce its slate of tech rulebooks, such as the Digital Markets Act, to create a level playing field.

The Commission can also play a role by favoring open-source technology in public procurement, Karlitschek added. “It would immediately create an explosion of startups, of innovation, of new products in Europe” and current U.S. suppliers would be disadvantaged since they’re not open-source, he said.