Europe Pursues Selective Tech Sovereignty as Full Independence From US and China Remains Out of Reach

The French government announced this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconferencing tools with a domestically developed alternative. Germany is constructing its own artificial intelligence platform. Firms in both nations are collaborating to produce AI chips capable of competing with those from the United States and China.

These measures represent modest progress in Europe’s critical effort to close the gap with the US and China in the pursuit of digital independence. European political and business leaders fear that without such autonomy, the continent will remain exposed to abrupt disruptions in access to essential technologies, as seen when President Trump recently restricted foreign users from certain Anthropic AI models. They also risk forfeiting income from a rapidly expanding sector.

Yet discussions with industry leaders, officials, entrepreneurs and economists indicate there is little doubt about whether Europe can shed its technological dependence in the near term.

It cannot.

Instead, leaders across the continent are confronting a narrower but formidable challenge: if total independence is unattainable, where should Europe concentrate its digital strategy to secure at least partial autonomy?

“One hundred percent autonomy in digital services is not at this stage something that is feasible,” said Anne Le Hénanff, France’s minister for artificial intelligence and digital affairs. “We just need to decide what we don’t want to be dependent on.”

European consumers and enterprises depend heavily on American and Chinese technology for social media, national security infrastructure and artificial intelligence. Despite concerns over weaker US data protection standards, they entrust data to firms such as Amazon. Multinationals like Mercedes-Benz develop key technologies in Chinese laboratories.

Europe’s sole homegrown large language model is Mistral AI, a three-year-old French startup valued at $14 billion and regarded as the country’s national AI champion. Its three founders previously worked at Google and Meta.

Executives concede that France lacks Silicon Valley’s financing culture to nurture startups. Across Europe, leaders warn that companies must relocate to America to scale.

Continental leaders now describe the reliance as strategically and economically hazardous, as Washington and Beijing increasingly use power to coerce others. They argue it heightens exposure to cyberattacks and to pressure from governments with divergent values.

“We need nothing more and nothing less than technological sovereignty in Europe, and therefore also in Germany, at least wherever it is attainable,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said last autumn. He cautioned that dependencies “are being exploited for power politics.”

Last week, the Netherlands unveiled plans for government-controlled data centers to shield sensitive information from foreign firms.

Last month, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu stated the domestic intelligence service would drop Palantir’s American AI tools for those of French firm ChapsVision.

“Just as we would not agree to transfer our national archives to California, we must use our own A.I. tools,” Lecornu said in a social media video.

Foreign tech dependence also threatens private firms. Many European companies use Chinese storage products and cannot ensure data is not shared with Chinese intelligence, said former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, now president of Dream, a vendor of in-country AI security systems.

Such dependence, Kurz said, is troubling when it involves “sensitive data in sectors like health care, where people feel a need that their data is protected.”

European governments are investing billions of euros to reduce dependencies in key areas.

France has pledged about $5.3 billion to procure digital tools from French firms.

Germany will spend over $20 billion in the coming years across six tech sectors including AI and biotech, contracting Deutsche Telekom and SAP to build a government AI platform isolatable from foreign rivals.

A German innovation agency launched a roughly $140 million fund for European AI startups. At its spring conference, officials aimed less to replace US and Chinese tech than to partner and become indispensable.

Research Minister Dorothee Bär noted German startups contributed to NASA’s Artemis II rocket.

“These mutual dependencies are also important, and the Americans in particular see that we have our own strengths,” Bär said, adding that Trump-era America “reacts exclusively to strength.”

German tech leaders see opportunity in manufacturing heritage to export advanced factory tooling.

“There are certain areas where Europe has an edge, actually,” said Antonio Krüger, CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. “This is an asset that I think the U.S. and China currently don’t have at that level of quality and amount.”

Europe’s strengths include basic research, said Anne Bouverot of a generative AI committee, citing Fraunhofer and CEA collaboration on next-gen chips.

Bouverot noted Europe’s weakness in growth capital; Mistral’s $1.5 billion stake sale to a Dutch firm is exceptional.

“We need to be able to finance start-ups better in Europe,” she said. “There’s lots of savings in Europe. Today, those savings are not used enough for start-ups. They either go to the U.S. or they stay in nonrisky investments.”

Bouverot said Europe will not fully detach from Silicon Valley but should secure autonomy in strategic areas to limit service cuts or breaches.

This contrasts with promises of full independence and falls short for those seeking freedom for economic gain from tech booms.

“The whole point of sovereignty for me is not security and resilience,” said Cristina Caffarra, chair of the EuroStack Initiative Foundation.

“It’s not democracy and all that,” she said. “It’s value capture.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.

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