Few phrases capture the mood in European capitals quite like the worry, voiced by one official this week, that someone abroad might hold a kill switch over the continent’s digital plumbing. That anxiety now has a legislative shape. The Commission has unveiled a sprawling technology sovereignty package built around two draft laws, a Chips Act 2.0 and a Cloud and AI Development Act, stitched together with an open source strategy and a roadmap for putting artificial intelligence to work in the energy grid.
The ambition is unusually blunt for a body that normally prefers the language of frameworks and harmonisation. Officials want to reduce structural dependence on suppliers outside the bloc, widen the choice of core technologies, and give Europe a credible shot at hosting the chips, data centres and models that the next decade of computing will run on. The unspoken subtext is the United States, whose hyperscalers dominate European cloud markets and whose export controls can reshape supply chains overnight.
The chips proposal is the more eye-catching of the pair. Where the original 2023 law leaned heavily on subsidies to attract fabrication plants, the sequel tilts toward demand. It backs the idea of an EU-based open foundry aimed at three-nanometre production and below, with pilot output pencilled in somewhere between 2030 and 2033, and it tries to manufacture customers as well as wafers by linking chip demand to the AI infrastructure the bloc is separately trying to build. Whether a continent that missed the last two semiconductor cycles can leap to the bleeding edge on that timeline is the multi-billion-euro question.
The cloud law is quieter but arguably more consequential for everyday business. It promises to streamline the permitting maze that slows datacentre construction, sets a target of roughly tripling European data centre capacity within five to seven years, and introduces a single EU-wide method for assessing how sovereign a given cloud or AI service really is. That sovereignty label could become a powerful procurement lever if public bodies are nudged or required to favour providers that score well, though the details will decide whether it bites or becomes another box-ticking exercise.
Industry reaction has been predictably split. Domestic providers see validation and a possible head start; the American giants that supply most of Europe’s compute see a thicket of new requirements dressed up as resilience. There is also the awkward arithmetic of energy. Tripling data centre capacity collides directly with the bloc’s climate commitments, which is why a parallel roadmap on AI and energy tries, somewhat optimistically, to present hungry server farms as partners in grid management rather than a drain on it.
Skeptics have heard sovereignty talk before. Past digital strategies promised European champions that never quite materialised, and the gap between political will and venture capital remains wide. Building foundries and hyperscale capacity demands patient money on a scale that fragmented national budgets struggle to mobilise, and the proposals must still survive years of negotiation with member states and the Parliament before a single chip is etched.
Yet the framing has shifted in a way that feels durable. The debate is no longer whether Europe should depend on foreign technology but how quickly it can build alternatives without strangling itself in red tape or blowing its carbon targets. The kill-switch metaphor is crude, but it has done its job. For the first time in years, digital autonomy is being treated less as a slogan and more as an industrial programme with deadlines attached. The hard part, as ever, starts now.
