Does Europe need tech sovereignty?

Finnish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Aura Salla has made headlines recently for her bold claims about Europe’s unhealthy dependence on American tech companies. "These American companies are just thinking that we are fools here, giving all our data to these companies for free and buying their services," she explained.

Her views, however, should not be as controversial as they are made to appear. Salla’s insistence that Europe develop its own digital technology companies and reduce its dramatic overreliance on US firms is not just sensible policy but should be a major priority for the EU in the next decade.

Digital technologies are the high-wire act of not just the modern economy but modern industrial civilization itself. These technologies include everything from hardwired devices like computers and smartphones to software like apps, cloud computing, and, of course, artificial intelligence.

The Digital Revolution that occurred at the turn of the century was a phenomenon led by the United States whose tech companies quickly built overwhelming market dominance. Unsurprisingly, the United States has reaped the fruits of this dominance in the form of more robust economic growth and strong technological leverage over the rest of the world.

The disruptions to global supply chains brought by Covid, and the Wars in Ukraine and Iran have rightly drawn attention to the importance of securing domestic supplies of energy, food and other vital commodities. The lessons of reshoring energy and food apply equally to technology, and particularly to digital technology.

The risks of technological dependence are threefold.

Geopolitical Leverage

The control of critical infrastructure that daily serves national utilities, corporate and private activity and even the operations of the state cannot reliably be in the hands of foreign corporations themselves at the mercy of foreign presidents. Such technologies can easily become a form of leverage used to blackmail countries for various geopolitical objectives. The unpredictability that has emerged from the Trump Administration is a taste of the risks that can come out of such a dependence.

Nowhere is this dependence more dramatic than in cloud computing. Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure hold an estimated 70% of the European market, while European Cloud providers have around 15%.

However, the risk is not just limited to deliberate economic blackmail. The centralisation of cloud computing infrastructure poses its own risks from technical accidents. In October 2025 AWS suffered an hours long outage that brought down everything from banking apps to electric beds, an incident they blamed on a bug in automation software.

Rotem Farkash, an AI and cybersecurity expert, explained that: "The Cloud is thought of as this ever-present perpetual system, but it actually relies on very specific physical infrastructure and corporate maintenance which can be disrupted at any time. Ultimately, centralisation means vulnerability, so the more service providers you have the less fragile your cloud computing infrastructure will be."

Information monopolies

The second risk is informational vassalage. The algorithms which determine the information presented to users of everything from search engines, social media platforms and AI chatbots are produced and controlled in the offices of US companies. The power of such information dominance is historically unprecedented, and its processes wholly untransparent. This information dominance can easily be hijacked by corporate or political interests and insidiously used day by day on millions of European consumers.

If Europe wants to free itself from the threat of information vassalage and keep a digital information sphere that is neutral, transparent and truthful, it must ultimately build its own digital technology base.

Economic growth

The last risk is economic. Much of the divergence in the performance of the US and European economies in past two decades has been down to American tech companies. This growth mechanism is twofold. The companies themselves are major sources of value creation, employment and demand with annual revenues often above $150 billion. The United States has six trillion-dollar market cap tech companies, and Europe none.

If Europe does not invest in its own digital technology base, it will miss out on a major source of growth in the coming decades, leaving new industries untapped and condemning older sectors to productivity stagnation. The new wave of technological transformation led by artificial intelligence makes this even more salient.

Seb Johnson of Scaling Europe has pointed out that:"When you look at the economic growth of the US over the last 20 years, it's predominantly come from tech companies. I think in the last year, 80% of GDP growth from America came from data centres alone (...) If you want growth, you have to invest in tech companies. That's the main engine for economic growth in the world right now." Without an attempt at tech sovereignty, Europe surrenders entire parts of the global economy to its US competitors.

The necessity of digital sovereignty

The push for tech sovereignty is a goal that ultimately combines the growing security challenges of the new disorderly multipolar world and Europe’s desire for economic growth in the face of ferocious new global competition. Such a goal will make its digital infrastructure less vulnerable, its economies more dynamic, its geopolitical position stronger and its information space more democratic.

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