Europe’s Sovereignty Stack Is Missing the Tech
On June 3, the European Commission presented its Technological Sovereignty Package as the next great step towards digital independence. Henna Virkkunen, the executive vice-president whose brief now includes “tech sovereignty”, framed it as the moment Europe would stop leaning on American cloud providers and Asian chipmakers. She told reporters in Brussels the aim was to ensure no provider of critical workloads held a “kill switch” over European systems. The proposed Cloud and AI Development Act would rank cloud providers by how “sovereign” they are, sorting them into four trust tiers, and steer sensitive public contracts towards the favoured tier. A revised Chips Act, badged Chips Act 2.0, would give Brussels more power to prioritise chip output in a crisis, including the power to override existing commercial agreements.