On 3 June 2026, the European Commission presented a package of measures intended to strengthen Europe's control over critical digital technologies and reduce its dependence on non-EU suppliers.
The package combines two legislative proposals, the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act, with an EU Open Source Strategy and a Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy. The legislative proposals must still pass through the European Parliament and Council before becoming law.
Four Connected Priorities
- Chips: Strengthening European semiconductor design and manufacturing capacity while reducing dependence on overseas supply chains.
- Cloud and AI: Expanding Europe's computing infrastructure, strengthening cloud sovereignty and aiming to at least triple EU data centre capacity over the next five to seven years.
- Open Source: Supporting secure and sustainable open-source technologies as credible alternatives to proprietary platforms in critical digital environments.
- Energy and Infrastructure: Connecting the growth of AI and data centres with energy availability, efficiency, cooling, power management and the resilience of Europe's wider energy system.
The Operational Challenge Behind the Policy
Technology sovereignty is not achieved simply by changing suppliers. Organisations must understand where their operational dependencies exist, determine which services are genuinely critical and build architectures that remain supportable when technology, regulation or geopolitical conditions change.
This has implications for: data centre capacity, power and cooling; cloud and edge architecture; supplier concentration and contractual risk; network and connectivity resilience; data location and operational control; open standards and interoperability; migration planning and service continuity; and security, governance and regulatory compliance.
A Challenge I Recognise from the Field
Throughout my career, I have worked on many of the operational questions now sitting behind Europe's sovereignty agenda.
My experience includes evaluating multiple satellite and Low Earth Orbit providers, developing private 4G and 5G strategies, integrating connectivity through SD-WAN and managing multi-vendor infrastructure across international energy operations.
The objective was not sovereignty for its own sake. It was to reduce single points of dependency, improve resilience, retain operational control and ensure that critical services remained supportable in demanding environments.
Europe's proposals bring those same considerations into a much wider discussion about cloud, AI, data centres, connectivity and critical infrastructure.
What Infrastructure Leaders Should Do Now
The package is still developing, but infrastructure leaders can begin by identifying critical supplier dependencies, reviewing exit and migration options, assessing data and operational control, and determining whether their current architectures provide genuine resilience.
Technology sovereignty should not become a political label attached to procurement. It should become a practical discipline for understanding dependency, protecting continuity and maintaining strategic choice.
Read the official European Commission announcement