The commission’s ‘AI continent’ rhetoric sits on top of bills that would allow it to cancel chip supply contracts and strip US providers of sensitive government data.
The European Commission has announced its long-delayed project technological sovereignty package Wednesday’s package of four measures is designed to reduce the bloc’s reliance on American and Asian technologies in semiconductors, the cloud, artificial intelligence and open source.
The Commission’s own brief expressed this in the language of ambition, a path to becoming what it called an “AI continent”. The accompanying draft texts read more like an attempt to take back control.
Two of the four tools carry weight. The first is the revised Chips Act billed as the Chips Act 2.0 shifts the emphasis from building factories to building demand For chips made in Europe.
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The original 2023 act dumped state subsidies on manufacturing plants and fell short of its targets, a loophole highlighted when Intel scrapped plans for two megafabs in Germany.
Inspection goes further to crisis powers: according to A project seen by the Financial TimesThe commission could force chipmakers to prioritize orders for crisis-critical products during shortages, cancel existing contracts, buy chips centrally for member states and fine companies up to €300,000 for withholding information about supply chain capabilities.
Urgency is not debatable. The EU produces less than 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors and is almost entirely dependent on the US and Asia for the most advanced sub-five nanometer chips that train AI models. More than 52 billion euros of public and private money have already been invested, and the movement of this share is limited.
Sovereignty test for the cloud
The second instrument with bite is the Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Development Act, which will create a single EU-wide framework defining four levels of cloud “sovereignty”.
State authorities had to flee sovereign risk assessment measuring how much of their infrastructure depends on non-EU firms, levels are assessed by service and supply chain controls, where AI data is processed, where the infrastructure is located and its cyber security.
It will have a practical impact on existing projects restricts member states from using US cloud providers processing of sensitive information related to the public sector in the health, financial and judicial systems, without affecting the use of the private sector.
The Commission’s vice-president for technological sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told reporters that the aim is to ensure that providers of critical workloads do not hold a “kill switch” on European data. He added that US companies will struggle to achieve the highest level of sovereignty because of the US CLOUD Act, which could force American companies to hand over data regardless of where it is stored.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put the case more clearly, calling the block cannot depend on others for technologies that keep their hospitals running and their networks 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 digitization and AI in the energy system. The whole package is based on the Draghi competitiveness report that found the EU Dependent on non-EU suppliersfor more than 80 percent of its digital products, services and infrastructure.
What happens next is as much a matter of policy as drafting. The texts must be approved by all 27 member states, and they are divided: France and Germany have pushed for a tougher line of European preferences, while the Nordics, where US cloud firms base most of their European operations, and Ireland want a softer reading.
The package also represents the EU’s first official legal definition of “digital sovereignty”, a phrase Brussels has used for years. Whether tools move the needle is an open question. Previous efforts from the Chips Act of 2023 to the block AI stops the gigafactory program and his sovereign cloud contractsambitious targets have not yet been spent.
