The Commission’s “AI continent” rhetoric comes on top of bills that would allow it to void chip supply contracts and keep U.S. suppliers away from sensitive government data.
The European Commission has unveiled its long-delayed technology sovereignty package on Wednesday, a package of four measures aimed at reducing the bloc’s dependence on American and Asian technology in semiconductors, cloud, artificial intelligence and open source.
The Commission’s own summary puts it in language of ambition, a path to becoming what it calls an “AI continent.” The attached draft texts read more like an attempt to regain control.
Two of the four instruments carry the weight. The first is a revised Chip Law, called Chip Law 2.0, which It shifts emphasis from building factories to building demand. for chips made in Europe.
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The original 2023 law earmarked public subsidies for manufacturing plants and fell short of its goals, a gap highlighted when Intel scrapped plans for two megafactories in Germany.
The review goes further regarding crisis powers: according to A draft seen by the Financial Times.The Commission could force chipmakers to prioritize orders for crisis-critical products during a shortage, void existing contracts, purchase chips centrally for member states and fine companies up to €300,000 for withholding information about their supply chain capacity.
The urgency is not in doubt. The EU produces less than 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors and remains almost entirely dependent on the United States and Asia for the most advanced chips, those smaller than five nanometers, the kind that train AI models. More than €52 billion in public and private money has already been committed, with limited movement in that proportion.
A proof of sovereignty for the cloud
The second strong instrument is the Cloud and AI Development Act, which would create a single EU-wide framework defining four levels of cloud “sovereignty.”
Public authorities would have to implement sovereignty risk assessments weigh the extent to which its infrastructure relies on non-EU companies, with levels judged based on control over the service and supply chain, where AI inference data is processed, where the infrastructure is located and its cybersecurity.
The practical effect, according to current projects, would be restrict member states from using US cloud providers process sensitive data from the public sector in the health, financial and judicial systems, without modifying the use of the private sector.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s vice president for technological sovereignty, told reporters that the goal was to ensure that critical workload providers do not control European data. He added that US companies would have difficulty reaching the highest level of sovereignty due to the US CLOUD Act, which can force US companies to hand over data regardless of where it is stored.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put the case more directly, saying that the bloc can’t afford to depend on others by the technologies that keep their hospitals running and their networks stable.
The remaining two measures are softer: an open source strategy to finance European alternatives and push public administrations towards open source tools, and a roadmap for digitalization and AI in the energy system. The entire package is based on Draghi’s competitiveness report, according to which the EU Dependence on non-EU suppliers.for more than 80 percent of its digital products, services and infrastructure.
What happens next is a matter of both policy and drafting. The texts must be approved by all 27 member states, and are divided: France and Germany have pushed for a stricter European preference line, while the Nordic countries and Ireland, where American cloud companies base much of their European operations, want a softer reading.
The package also includes the EU’s first formal legal definition of “digital sovereignty”, a phrase that Brussels has used for years without specifying. The open question is whether the instruments move the needle. Previous efforts, from the Chip Law of 2023 to the block stalled AI gigafactory program and his sovereign cloud contractsset ambitious targets that spending has yet to meet.
