The Commission’s ‘AI continent’ rhetoric sits atop draft laws that would let it override chip supply contracts and keep US providers away from sensitive government data.
The European Commission unveiled its long-delayed technological sovereignty package on Wednesday, a bundle of four measures meant to loosen the bloc’s dependence on American and Asian technology across semiconductors, cloud, artificial intelligence and open source.
The Commission’s own summary cast it in the language of ambition, a route to becoming what it calls an “AI continent.” The accompanying draft texts read more like an attempt to claw back control.
Two of the four instruments carry the weight. The first is a revised Chips Act, billed as Chips Act 2.0, which shifts the emphasis from building factories to building demand for European-made chips.
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The original 2023 act poured public subsidies into fabrication plants and fell short of its targets, a gap underlined when Intel scrapped plans for two mega-fabs in Germany.
The revision goes further on crisis powers: according to a draft seen by the Financial Times, the Commission could force chipmakers to prioritise orders for crisis-critical products during a shortage, override existing contracts, buy 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 dispute. The EU produces under 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors and remains almost wholly reliant on the United States and Asia for the most advanced chips, those below five nanometres, the kind that train AI models. More than €52bn in public and private money has already been committed, with limited movement on that share.
A sovereignty test for the cloud
The second instrument with bite is the Cloud and AI Development Act, which would create a single EU-wide framework defining four tiers of cloud “sovereignty.”
Public authorities would have to run sovereignty risk assessments weighing how much of their infrastructure depends on non-EU firms, with the tiers judged on control over the service and supply chain, where AI inference data is processed, where the infrastructure sits and its cybersecurity.
The practical effect, on current drafts, would restrict member states from using US cloud providers to process sensitive public-sector data in healthcare, finance and judicial systems, while leaving private-sector use untouched.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission vice-president for tech sovereignty, told reporters the aim was to ensure providers of critical workloads do not hold a “kill switch” over European data. She added that US companies would struggle to reach the highest sovereignty tier because of the US CLOUD Act, which can compel American firms to hand over data regardless of where it is stored.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put the case more bluntly, saying the bloc cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep its hospitals running and its grids stable.
The remaining two measures are softer: an open-source strategy to fund European alternatives and push public administrations towards open-source tools, and a roadmap for digitalisation and AI in the energy system. The whole package leans on the Draghi competitiveness report, which found the EU reliant on non-EU suppliersfor more than 80 percent of its digital products, services and infrastructure.
What happens next is a question of politics as much as drafting. The texts must be approved by all 27 member states, and they are split: France and Germany have pushed for a stricter European-preference line, while the Nordics and Ireland, where US cloud firms base much of their European operations, want a softer reading.
The package also carries the EU’s first formal legal definition of “digital sovereignty,” a phrase Brussels has used for years without pinning down. Whether the instruments move the needle is the open question. Earlier efforts, from the 2023 Chips Act to the bloc’s stalling AI gigafactory programme and its sovereign cloud contracts, set ambitious targets the spending has not yet met.
