The Quest for ‘Technological Sovereignty’ in Europe (and Why It’s So Hard)

The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China.

These are modest steps in Europe’s high-stakes race to catch up to America and China in the global sprint for digital independence. Without it, Europe’s political and business leaders worry, they will be vulnerable to sudden losses of access to critical technologies, as after President Trump’s recent decision to cut off foreigners from some of Anthropic’s latest artificial intelligence models. They will also miss out on revenues from a booming industry.

Yet interviews with industry leaders, public officials, entrepreneurs and economists suggest there is currently little question about whether Europe can wean itself off tech dependence anytime soon.

It cannot.

Instead, political and business leaders across the continent are wrestling with a more limited, but still daunting, question. If full independence is impossible, where should Europe focus its digital efforts, in pursuit of 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.”

Europe’s consumers and businesses rely heavily on American and Chinese imports for their digital lives, including social media, national security systems and artificial intelligence. They store data with American companies, like Amazon, despite European concerns over the comparative laxness of American data protection rules. European-based multinational companies, like Mercedes-Benz, hone some of their most important new technology in Chinese labs.