Digital sovereignty – a government’s ownership and control of the technology infrastructure supporting digital networks within its jurisdiction – is rising up the political agenda in Brussels.
Digital infrastructure and services are based overwhelmingly in the US, and the government there has for decades used this technological dominance as a tool for foreign policy and spycraft. But resistance is finally boiling in Europe, fuelled not by the infamous Snowden revelations nor the US Cloud Act, which stipulates that US businesses must surrender their data should the country’s intelligence agencies demand it, but by an ill-fated speech delivered by the US vice-president, JD Vance.
Speaking at the 2025 Munich Security Conference in February this year, Vance criticised EU leaders for allegedly failing to uphold Western democratic values and questioned the legitimacy of EU institutions. Against a backdrop of US policy changes regarding the war in Ukraine, the speech was perceived by US allies and adversaries as an attack on Europe and exacerbated a rift in transatlantic relations.
At the same time, the Trump administration threatened to impose tariffs on the bloc owing to its strict regulation of Silicon Valley firms, thus making big tech not just an economic issue but a foreign policy issue, too.
Six months after Vance’s speech, technologists, policymakers, think-tanks and antitrust experts gathered in Munich for the annual Nextcloud Summit to determine the way forward for technological autonomy in Europe.
“We are being blackmailed by the current US administration and the American and Chinese tech companies,” said Alexandra Geese, the German Greens MEP who helped craft Europe’s Digital Services Act, at a press conference.
“This is why it’s so important that we build our own technological and digital infrastructure, that we support our own companies, that we keep the talent we have here in Europe,” she added. “Not closing Europe off, but working with open standards.”
Hyperscalers’ ‘army of lobbyists’ working against digital sovereignty
Cristina Caffara, an economist and antitrust expert, says the hyperscalers have responded to this movement by deploying an “army of lobbyists” in Brussels. Together with Geese, Caffara launched the Eurostack policy initiative, which aims to build digital sovereignty in Europe and enhance the digital competitiveness of the Continent.
At the press conference, Caffara said the lobbyists are “relentlessly” targeting senior figures in Brussels to derail digital sovereignty efforts in Europe. The panellists even speculated that the EU-backed digital sovereignty initiative, Gaia-X, had been “infiltrated” by tech companies seeking to sabotage the movement by overloading it with bureaucracy.
It’s very easy to imagine Trump deciding a German company is evil and stopping its services
The hyperscalers are not deaf to Europeans’ concerns. Google and Microsoft, for instance, recently issued public statements designed to allay any worries about US hostilities; providers are building strictly EU-regulated data centres across Europe; and, earlier this year, Google launched its ‘cloud data boundary’, which gives customers more control over where data is stored and processed, and a ‘user data shelf’ for validating the security of apps built via that data boundary.
However, Frank Karlitschek, the CEO of Nextcloud, which supplies customers including France’s interior ministry and Amnesty International with open-source, self-hosted collaboration software, describes such moves from the hyperscalers as “sovereignty-washing”.
“[The hyperscalers] say they have hosting centres in Europe, so it’s all fine. But the Cloud Act states that if you’re a US organisation, you follow the US law, which means you need to give US agencies access to this data,” Karlitschek said at the press conference.
Too late to take back control?
The threats described by the panellists are not merely theoretical. In countries hit by US sanctions, citizens and businesses have found themselves suddenly unable to access the digital services they rely on.
There is a risk, added Geese, that the hyperscalers will be further politicised by the Trump administration and restrict the provision of digital services to certain users should doing so prove politically expedient.
“It’s very easy to imagine Trump deciding that a German company is evil and then stopping its services,” said Geese. “The potential is definitely there.”
We are being blackmailed by the current US administration
But if mitigating these risks requires Europe to become truly digitally sovereign, businesses in the bloc will have to cope with uncertainty in the near term.
Not only are the most powerful software companies headquartered in the US, but many of the most common components or architectures are also manufactured by American businesses, such as Intel, Nvidia and AMD.
The most attractive alternatives to US tech services are arguably found in China. Of course, doing business with Chinese providers also presents significant challenges. But projects between Chinese and European firms are already underway. For instance, a joint venture between TSMC, Infineon, NXP and Bosch is building a €10bn (£8.46bn) microchip fabrication plant in Germany to support European chip production.
Still, US tech firms continue to win service contracts in Europe. Some Nextcloud Summit attendees were horrified to learn that the IT provider for Germany’s armed forces had contracted Google for the Bundeswehr’s cloud services.
Geese is hopeful, however. “We should have started a lot earlier,” she said. “I often get the question, ‘Is it too late?’ Well, it’s always too late. But let’s start now.”
Digital sovereignty and the UK
Concerns about digital sovereignty have had little influence on UK policies thus far.
According to Keir Starmer, the UK hopes to forge its own path, unbeholden to Europe, the US or China; to become an “AI superpower”. But, in practice, the UK appears to be hewing closer to the US, having just welcomed a wave of investment in data centre infrastructure from Oracle, AWS, Google and Microsoft.
Peter Kyle, the technology minister, has been criticised for holding frequent meetings with firms including Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta since Labour’s election win in 2024. Public records show that he met with US big tech representatives 70% more often than his predecessor over a six-month period.
Meanwhile, at the opening of London Tech Week, Starmer and Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, took the stage to announce a UK sovereign AI industry forum to be led by the US tech company in partnership with UK businesses such as Babcock, BAE Systems, BT, National Grid and Standard Chartered.
The aim of this group is to “strengthen the nation’s economic security by advancing sovereign AI infrastructure and accelerating the growth of the UK AI startup ecosystem”. Starmer also committed investing an additional £1bn in sovereign compute power at the event. Advocates of European digital sovereignty, including attendees of the Munich conference, might point out the irony of a major US power broker overseeing the effort.
Digital sovereignty – a government's ownership and control of the technology infrastructure supporting digital networks within its jurisdiction – is rising up the political agenda in Brussels.
Digital infrastructure and services are based overwhelmingly in the US, and the government there has for decades used this technological dominance as a tool for foreign policy and spycraft. But resistance is finally boiling in Europe, fuelled not by the infamous Snowden revelations nor the US Cloud Act, which stipulates that US businesses must surrender their data should the country's intelligence agencies demand it, but by an ill-fated speech delivered by the US vice-president, JD Vance.
Speaking at the 2025 Munich Security Conference in February this year, Vance criticised EU leaders for allegedly failing to uphold Western democratic values and questioned the legitimacy of EU institutions. Against a backdrop of US policy changes regarding the war in Ukraine, the speech was perceived by US allies and adversaries as an attack on Europe and exacerbated a rift in transatlantic relations.
