Can Europe break free of American tech supremacy?

Irish Times

2 days ago

Benjamin Revcolevschi, an engineer by training, did not imagine one of his future jobs would involve meeting digital ministers from EU member states almost every week.
But the chief executive of OVHcloud, a provider of cloud computing services, is riding a new wave of political interest as
EU
leaders increasingly wake up to the bloc's dependence on US tech companies for the infrastructure that powers everything from healthcare systems to national defence.
'We have been on the sovereignty topic for the past 20 years,' Revcolevschi says. But since the election of US president
Donald Trump
, the tone of the political conversations has changed, he adds. 'This is truly a different world.'
Europe is grappling with uncertainty over the US president's long-term commitment to the transatlantic security alliance and his tendency in negotiations to conflate issues such as trade, defence and regulation.
READ MORE
Trump has fuelled anxiety among European governments and companies over privacy and data access and prompted concerns that the US could suspend or block the operations of US tech companies in Europe altogether.
Those operations are both deep and wide.
Amazon
,
Microsoft
and
Google
control more than two-thirds of the European cloud computing market. Google and Apple prevail in the mobile phone operating systems in the EU, while Google dominates the global search market.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is the leading artificial intelligence chatbot in Europe, while the social media platforms that millions of Europeans use are mostly US-owned.
Just as in defence, the transatlantic tech dependency has become a geopolitical liability, amplifying long-standing calls for Europe to invest more and even favour its own companies in procurement. In a symbolic nod to the new realisation, Henna Virkkunen, who started in December as the EU's new tech commissioner, has the moniker 'tech sovereignty' added to her title.
The Finnish politician wants to focus on Europe's independence in areas such as quantum computing, AI and semiconductors. 'These are identified as critical technologies and it's important that we build up our own capacities here,' she told the Financial Times this month.
But as Europe moves from analysing the problem to proposing potential solutions, such as favouring European tech companies over American ones, it must also grapple with its own lack of alternatives. Only a handful of the world's top 50 tech companies are European. Tech start-ups in the region face regulatory uncertainty, fragmentation and a lack of financing options to help them grow, especially in venture capital.
'When you want to buy European, you need to have something to buy which is produced in the European Union,' says Dariusz Standerski, state secretary at Poland's digital affairs ministry, who chaired meetings of the bloc's digital ministers while Poland held the rotating EU presidency.
In a landmark report on EU competitiveness last year, the former Italian prime minister
Mario Draghi
demonstrated clearly that Europe saw its productivity gap with the US widen mostly because of the EU's weakness in emerging technologies.
For Andy Yen, founder and chief executive of Proton, the Geneva-based group behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused applications, the debate around nurturing home-grown tech groups is about exactly this.
'If we don't invest in tech in Europe, we are simply opting out of the biggest driver of economic growth,' he tells the FT.
'These are the companies that are going to create the high-paying jobs, the high profits and revenues, which will allow us to fund our social system.'
France's Mistral AI is an example of Europe's wider struggles to capitalise on promising starts in next-generation technology.
Once hailed as a potential global leader in AI, it has lost ground to US rivals backed by Big Tech groups and, like many others, was taken aback by the capability of China's DeepSeek. Meanwhile, the bloc is struggling to balance the challenge of regulating AI with the need to attract enough investment and talent to increase the computing capacity in the bloc.
That leads directly back to cloud computing, an immediate priority when it comes to reducing reliance on US tech groups. As more governments, companies and citizens move data from on-premise servers to a cloud-based environment, data centres and their associated cabling have become critical infrastructure for modern life.
US companies dominate the European cloud market, prompting worries among European policymakers and industry leaders that US law, particularly the Cloud Act, could embolden the Trump administration to exert more leverage over European data – even if it is stored on servers located in Europe.
That is worrisome because Washington has also moved from complaining about EU regulation and enforcement actions on tech to challenging those decisions and 'coupling that with threats around tariffs, sometimes even tying it to security decisions that could negatively impact the continent', says Zach Meyers, of the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) think tank.
Key institutions, including the European Commission, are now in talks with players such as OVHcloud to transition some of their cloud services away from US companies in order to enhance Europe's digital autonomy.
Later this year, the European Commission will present a new act intended to address Europe's gap in cloud and AI infrastructure capacity, including actions to increase the secure processing capacity of EU-based cloud providers.
EU officials are still mulling whether and how they could include 'Buy European' provisions – which would favour European companies over American ones – in the legislation while still trying to respect the World Trade Organisation's agreement on government procurement, which requires domestic and overseas bidders to be considered equally.
Proponents say doing so would nudge investments towards European tech companies, help to boost the existing tech ecosystem across the bloc and accelerate the build-up of alternatives to US providers.
The EU has tried to use industrial policy in things like cloud computing in the past and they have been thoroughly unsuccessful
Alexandre Roure of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include many Big Tech groups, says the debate about blunt market access restrictions for non-EU tech companies 'only distracts policymakers from the real task: finally delivering a functioning digital single market with clear, simple and practical rules'.
But it increasingly looks like the direction of travel in Europe. The bloc has already announced it wants EU governments to exclude foreign bidders in public procurement tenders in its forthcoming public procurement directive, which the bloc's commissioner for prosperity and industrial strategy Stéphane Séjourné has dubbed a 'Buy European Act'.
Séjourné, a former French foreign minister and close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, has previously told the FT that he sees favouring European bidders in public procurement as a 'first step'.
While he refrained from confirming he would push for such clauses in the forthcoming cloud initiative, Séjourné did say that action was needed in areas in the private sector where Europe was totally dependent on one country, arguing that 'in tech, we're very, very dependent on the Americans'.
Marc Ferracci, the French industry minister, has been more specific, telling reporters that 'Buy European' clauses should be applied to critical industries, adding that for him 'cloud data centres, especially server infrastructure, is such a critical industry'.
Faced with the prospect of the playing field being tilted away from them, Big Tech is putting up a fight. In recent months, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all announced so-called sovereign cloud offerings, designed to keep data and operational control within a specific geography, to reassure their European customers.
Microsoft's top legal officer previously told the FT that if necessary, the company would take the US government to court to protect European customers' access to its services, positioning itself as a 'source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility'.
Google is rolling out 'air-gapped' solutions – where a client's data does not have to be connected to other networks – and beefing up its sovereign cloud options in the EU. Amazon has introduced new sovereign controls and established independent governance for its European organisation.
For Roure, of the CCIA, real sovereignty is more about managing dependencies by expanding free choice. 'The true priority should be avoiding [a situation where] European users are locked in by a single cloud vendor and ensuring healthy competition – not forcing the use of certain companies at the expense of efficiency.'
Revcolevschi, the OVHcloud CEO, welcomes Big Tech's latest initiatives but says it is up to corporate decision makers 'to truly analyse what they are served with' given that data localisation or encryption alone are not enough to provide true sovereignty in cloud computing.
The digital sovereignty debate reaches far beyond cloud computing, touching on all digital infrastructure and its use. Rising awareness has led to initiatives such as EuroStack, which aims to build a European tech infrastructure, and calls for policymakers to not just prioritise European companies in public procurement but also launch a fund to stimulate home-grown tech. The initiative was explicitly mentioned in the coalition agreement between Germany's two main parties.
But investment is a key stumbling block to achieving those goals. EuroStack argues that investment of €300 billion is needed over the next decade. Other estimates put the amount as high as €5 trillion.
Even if the EU could pool public and private financing to boost its digital infrastructure, as officials and researchers have argued it should, that risks taking too much time or not materialising at all.
The obvious example of this, cited so frequently it has turned into a cliche, is the Franco-German Gaia-X initiative, a network of linked cloud providers that hoped to challenge US cloud dominance in Europe.
For others, the debate has to move away from just the infrastructure.
'What we lack is not chips and data centres,' said Christian Klein, chief executive of Germany's SAP, Europe's biggest software group, on a recent call with reporters.
'We are lacking the people and the talent who can apply AI in the context of what we need in Europe.'
Boosting Europe's tech capabilities is also regarded in Brussels as an opportunity to arrest the bloc's economic slowdown.
Yen, at Proton, adds that key European sectors such as cars, banking, ecommerce and healthcare are all set to be even more disrupted by tech. For him, the short-term transition costs incurred by moving away from US tech providers are not a cost but 'an investment in the future'.
[
Trump keen for US to manufacture iPhones; here's how India is doing it
Opens in new window
]
Sovereignty provisions can too easily slip into protectionism without delivering outcomes for users or public institutions
'If you don't have the engineers, the talent, the know-how to build this type of stuff here, you're basically screwed for the 21st century,' he says. 'We don't have a chance. Even without Trump, this is something that has to be done.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
'