Brussels: The vocabulary of European technology policy has shifted, and the shift is telling. Where officials once spoke of the single digital market and light-touch harmonisation, they now speak of sovereignty, dependency and, in one memorable phrase from the package’s unveiling, the fear that someone else might hold a kill switch. The Technological Sovereignty Package the Commission presented on 3 June 2026 is the clearest expression yet of a Union that has concluded its digital future cannot be rented from others.
The package bundles two legislative proposals with a pair of strategies. The Chips Act 2.0 aims to move beyond the first Chips Act’s mixed record by prioritising an advanced semiconductor foundry on European soil and marshalling both supply and demand. The Cloud and AI Development Act sets out to triple the bloc’s data-centre capacity within five to seven years and to define tiers of sovereignty for sensitive public-sector workloads. Alongside sit an Open Source Strategy and a roadmap for AI in energy systems. In July 2026 the Commission is expected to open a call for AI Gigafactories, following the EuroHPC governing board’s agreement in principle on 1 June.
Taken together the measures amount to an industrial policy dressed in the language of security, and that is both their strength and their vulnerability. The strength is honesty about the problem. Europe consumes cloud services, chips and foundation models largely produced elsewhere, and dependence becomes leverage the moment geopolitics turns hostile. Building domestic capacity in the most strategically exposed layers of the stack is a defensible response to a genuine risk.
The vulnerability lies in the record. The original Chips Act promised to double Europe’s share of global semiconductor production to 20 percent by 2030, a target now widely regarded as out of reach. Subsidised fabs take years to build, demand skilled workers the continent is short of, and compete against American and Asian rivals backed by deeper pockets and larger home markets. A foundry conjured by procurement targets and state aid is not the same as a foundry that customers actually choose. Announcing a Chips Act 2.0 before the first has delivered invites the question of whether the instrument or the ambition was miscalibrated.
Cloud policy raises a subtler tension. Tripling data-centre capacity is a capital-intensive undertaking with an obvious environmental cost, arriving just as the Union tightens its climate law and frets about electricity prices. The roadmap for AI in energy is presumably meant to square that circle, but data centres are voracious consumers of power, and sovereignty that drives up emissions or bills will find its political welcome short-lived. There is also the matter of the firms best placed to build at scale: several are the very hyperscalers whose dominance the sovereignty agenda is meant to counter.
The most interesting bet is the embrace of open source as strategic infrastructure rather than hobbyist idealism. Open standards and shared code are harder for any single vendor to weaponise, and a Union that cannot outspend its rivals may find that openness is the one lever it can genuinely pull. Whether Brussels can nurture that ecosystem without smothering it in procurement rules is an open question.
What the package cannot escape is the gap between declaration and delivery that has haunted European industrial ambition for a decade. Sovereignty is not achieved by legislation; it is achieved by factories that run, clouds that customers trust, and models that developers adopt. The Commission has correctly diagnosed the dependency. The harder task, and the one on which this agenda will be judged, is turning a well-argued strategy into capacity that exists when the next crisis tests it. On that, the July gigafactory call will offer an early and unforgiving read.
