Who owns Europe’s digital future? Key takeaways from the Tech Sovereignty debate in the European Parliament
-
The European DIGITAL SME Alliance and MEP Alexandra Geese convened policymakers, European cloud providers, and industrial users to address how to enable Europe´s tech sovereignty.
-
Industry champions – including Schwarz Digits and Dassault Systèmes – but also leading SMEs such as SIMPLITO, NextCloud and Clever Cloud, joined the event, converging on a core message: regulation alone will not shift Europe’s cloud market. Europe must actively stimulate demand for its own solutions, including via the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA).
-
The Tech Sovereignty Catalogue shows that European sovereign solutions already exist, and the recent Commission’s €180 million cloud tender proves they can deliver at scale. CADA must now turn this example into a systemic approach by scaling demand and making collaboration among providers the default model in Europe.
European cloud providers hold just 13% of their home market. Hyperscalers control the rest. Behind that number lies an uncomfortable question: can Europe afford this kind of structural dependency affecting critical infrastructure across its own public services, industries and democratic institutions?
The European Commission’s recent €180 million cloud tender showed that European industry can deliver at scale. By awarding multiple contracts in parallel, it demonstrated that collaboration is the European way. A federated approach, favouring diversification over dependency, is one that can reflect European strengths in practice.
The key question is how to turn that example into policy.
On 21 April, the European DIGITAL SME Alliance and MEP Alexandra Geese, in collaboration with the Democratic Tech Alliance, brought together European cloud and AI providers, major industrial users, and policymakers, including the European Parliament Vice-President, MEP Stefanuta, and MEP Kobosko, to put that question to the test.
The debate served to feed into the design of the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), and the conversation was candid about what tech sovereignty actually requires in practice.
A central theme emerged: the need to shift focus towards demand. For years, policy efforts focused on supporting the development of European supply. However, without the right incentives and procurement frameworks, this alone will not change market dynamics. Here is where EU policy, such as CADA, becomes critical.
As MEP Geese framed the political stakes from the outset, underlying that this is not just an economic issue: “When critical infrastructure depends on technology subject to US jurisdiction, that is a structural vulnerability”.”Tech sovereignty”, she argued, “is a democratic issue at its core’’.
As Sebastiano Toffaletti, Secretary General of the European DIGITAL SME Alliance, said: “CADA must create the conditions for European providers to be chosen, while the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue is already doing part of the work, showing that sovereign alternatives exist”.
Clarity also emerged as a key requirement for the upcoming Cloud and AI law. In particular, European Commission’s Thibaut Kleiner acknowledged that the definition of sovereign cloud technology will be decisive: strong criteria can enable real European capacity, while weak ones risk opening doors to ’’sovereignty washing’’.
What the Commission’s cloud tender has shown is that Europe’s model already works: a federated, interoperable ecosystem where multiple providers collaborate. The task now is to embed this model in policy.
This is where the upcoming CADA becomes central. It must translate a successful procurement example into a broader strategy, aligning public and private actors, strengthening demand for European solutions, and turning Europe’s fragmentation into resilience.
Europe’s path to tech sovereignty is not to replicate the Silicon Valley model, but to build a federated interoperable ecosystem of providers.
As the CADA is expected to land on 27 May, the debate in the European Parliament made the way forward on tech sovereignty clear: Europe needs to use demand-side instruments to scale homegrown solutions developed by a federated ecosystem of European providers.
