The Apply AI Strategy: Ensuring Europe invests in itself
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The Commission’s Apply AI Strategy is a real step forward — it finally puts technological sovereignty at the centre of Europe’s AI agenda, with the right focus on European-made models and local cloud systems.
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The strategy emphasizes European solutions and open-source models, particularly for public sector AI adoption, supports SMEs through Digital Innovation Hubs that will help deploy AI on local cloud systems, and commits to developing frontier AI capabilities through a dedicated initiative.
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To translate these ambitions into practice, the Commission should also condition public funding to genuinely sovereign AI technologies — European-owned, European-governed, and deployed on European infrastructure.
Today, the European Commission unveiled its long-awaited Apply AI Strategy — a plan to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence across Europe’s strategic sectors. Backed by €1 billion in EU funds, the initiative aims to deploy AI in ten key areas, including defence, manufacturing, energy and healthcare, with the overarching goal of strengthening Europe’s technological sovereignty. For Europe’s digital ecosystem, this represents welcome recognition that competitiveness and security depend on controlling the technologies we deploy.
What’s positive: The strategy rightly emphasizes European-made solutions and open models, particularly for public sector AI adoption. The focus on supporting SMEs through European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) — including helping them fine-tune and run AI tools on local, sovereign cloud infrastructure — and the commitment to developing frontier AI capabilities through a dedicated initiative are important steps. The €1 billion investment signals serious intent to move from AI policy to AI practice.
What’s missing: Despite these ambitions, the strategy lacks the binding conditionality needed to deliver true sovereignty. While references to “European solutions” appear throughout the document — especially for public administration — there are no explicit requirements linking EU funding and public procurement to genuinely sovereign technologies. In critical sectors like manufacturing, mobility, or energy, this clarity is largely absent. Without such conditionality, Europe risks using taxpayer money to subsidize deployments of foreign AI systems, precisely the opposite of the strategy’s stated ambition.
Europe’s tech SMEs stand ready to make sovereignty real — but only if funding mechanisms ensure that European public investment catalyses European AI capabilities. The Apply AI Strategy could become a cornerstone of Europe’s digital future, but its success depends on one principle: Europe must invest in its own capacity to develop and deploy homegrown AI innovation.
