“If we want to maintain sovereignty and wealth within our economies, we must control these technological domains—otherwise our wealth will flow خارج the continent.” This was stated by Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges on March 2 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Standing alongside him, Eutelsat CEO Jean-François Fallacher described his company as being “in combat mode” against Starlink’s dominance, while Telefónica CEO Marc Murtra called on Europe for “pro-technology regulation and speed.”
The fact that the leaders of Europe’s three largest telecom companies turned the most prominent stage in the telecommunications industry into a platform for digital sovereignty speaks volumes about the urgency of the issue across the continent.
The numbers from EuroStack confirm this. The report, published in February 2025 by Bertelsmann Stiftung and CEPS—after which the initiative is named and which is also supported by the European Parliament’s ITRE Committee (Industry, Research, Energy)—paints a stark picture. More than 80% of Europe’s digital infrastructure is imported, 70% of foundational AI models originate in the United States, and only 7% of global R&D spending on software and the internet comes from European companies.
U.S. cloud providers—so-called hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—control around 85% of the European market, according to Synergy Research Group. EuroStack proposes a continent-wide industrial response: mobilizing approximately €300 billion over ten years to build a full European technology stack—an autonomous digital infrastructure spanning connectivity, cloud, AI, and semiconductors.
Italy mirrors this trend. According to the Data Center Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, €7.1 billion was invested in new data centers between 2023 and 2025, with a further €25.4 billion expected by 2028. However, 72% of this is attributable to international operators not yet active in the country. As Observatory director Marina Natalucci notes, “a large portion of installed capacity is in the hands of U.S. players.”
What makes the issue no longer postponable is today’s geopolitical context. As the Atlantic Council outlines, in 2025 tensions between the Trump administration and the EU—combined with close ties between the White House and Big Tech leadership—pushed transatlantic relations to unprecedented levels of strain. The U.S. Cloud Act, in particular, allows American authorities to request access to data managed by U.S. companies regardless of where it is stored.
Questioned in the French Senate, the president of Microsoft France admitted he could not guarantee that French data would not be transferred to Washington. More recently, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan—sanctioned by the United States over war crimes investigations—temporarily lost access to his Outlook account, forcing the International Criminal Court to replace Microsoft with OpenDesk, an open-source suite developed by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty.
The question is clear: if Europe wants to avoid such interference, is it ready to cut the cord?
Looking sector by sector at what should form a European tech stack, the landscape remains uneven. In cloud computing, providers such as OVHcloud, Stackit, Ionos, Hetzner, and Scaleway offer infrastructure services comparable to hyperscalers. According to Gartner, 61% of European CIOs plan to migrate workloads to local providers for geopolitical reasons.
In artificial intelligence, France’s Mistral AI and Germany’s Aleph Alpha are Europe’s leading champions, joined by Black Forest Labs, DeepL, and Hugging Face—yet they still lag far behind their American counterparts.
In telecommunications networks, Europe is caught between two dependencies: China, with Huawei—still the world’s leading telecom equipment supplier with 31% of the global market, according to Omdia—and Starlink, entirely controlled by SpaceX. In January 2026, the European Commission formalized a proposal to ban high-risk vendors from European networks, while the EU’s IRIS² satellite program (290 satellites and a €10.6 billion budget) will not be operational before 2029.
In semiconductors, the Chips Act aims to bring chip production back to Europe by mobilizing over €80 billion. Meanwhile, in quantum computing, the Commission is expected to introduce a Quantum Act in 2026 to translate Europe’s research leadership into industrial capacity.
The reality is that Europe’s entire digital architecture—and especially the data it relies on (email, productivity tools, identity systems, communications)—currently rests largely on non-European platforms. Initiatives such as GAIA-X, Catena-X, the European Health Data Space, and the Data Act aim to reverse this trend, but the road ahead remains long.
EuroStack presents itself as the most comprehensive response. It calls for “open, rules-based partnerships that respect European values while protecting critical capabilities.” As a first step, €10 billion is expected to flow into a European technology fund through a pan-European competition—the EuroStack Challenge. A catalog of European IT solutions has also been launched to help public and private buyers identify sovereign alternatives.
The economic dimension is equally significant. According to the EuroStack Industry Initiative, Europe transfers approximately €264 billion each year to foreign tech providers. Gartner forecasts that spending on sovereign cloud solutions will triple to $23 billion by 2027, while IDC reports that 63% of organizations are now more inclined to adopt sovereign cloud services precisely because of recent geopolitical developments.
The transition will not be abrupt—Forrester estimates that no European company will fully abandon hyperscalers in 2026. Europe is not necessarily being asked to choose between autarky and subordination, but rather to strike a balance—one that enables it to exercise a form of sovereignty that is now inextricably linked to technology.