“Today is Tech Liberation Day,” said a European Commission official as the EU executive presented its long-awaited Tech Sovereignty Package on Wednesday (3 June), an anticipated bundle of laws and communications outlining how the European Union can achieve some more autonomy in the technological sphere. Yet, liberation rarely happens overnight.
Still, the package marks one of the EU’s most ambitious attempts yet to reduce its dependence on foreign technology. It bundles together a revised Chips Act, a new Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), an Open Source Strategy, and a roadmap for digitising Europe’s energy system.
Europe wants more control over the technologies that power its economy, governments and critical infrastructure. Most of the digital world runs on technology designed, manufactured or operated elsewhere. American firms dominate cloud computing. Asian manufacturers dominate advanced chips. As artificial intelligence spreads through every sector, those dependencies are becoming harder for policymakers to ignore.
The centrepiece is the new Chips Act 2.0. The first Chips Act focused largely on supply: building factories, supporting research, and attracting investment. The new version tries to create demand for European chips that European companies want to buy. New “demand accelerators” and industry forums will connect chipmakers with sectors such as robotics, data centres and AI infrastructure. Public procurement will become a strategic tool. In critical sectors, authorities may eventually require companies to diversify suppliers, conduct risk assessments or avoid excessive dependence on a single source.
The logic is straightforward. Europe’s AI ambitions will require enormous amounts of computing power. Computing power requires chips. If Europe wants more technological autonomy, it needs both production and customers.
If the Chips Act is about silicon, CADA is about where that silicon is used. The legislation aims to triple Europe’s data-centre capacity within the next decade. New “acceleration zones” will streamline permits and improve access to energy and land. The Commission wants Europe to build more cloud infrastructure, faster.
Again, the motivation is sovereignty. Currently, the European cloud market is dominated by American hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They remain hugely popular, but concerns about security, resilience and geopolitical risk have pushed policymakers to seek alternatives and avoid single-supplier vulnerabilities.
CADA’s most controversial element is its sovereignty framework for cloud services.
Under a four-tier system, public authorities will classify cloud services according to their level of autonomy from foreign influence. The higher the level, the stricter the requirements. At the package’s launch, Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen stated that American providers would be unable to reach the highest sovereignty levels because of the U.S. Cloud Act, which allows American authorities to request access to data held by U.S. companies, even when stored abroad.
Lastly, the Commission sees open source as an important part of the future. Open source software allows anyone to inspect, modify and share the underlying code. It powers much of the internet already, from servers to operating systems. The Commission sees it as a natural ally of technological sovereignty.
The new Open Source Strategy seeks to expand European open-source alternatives in cloud computing, AI, cybersecurity and semiconductors. Public administrations will be encouraged to consider open-source solutions in procurement decisions. The idea is not merely to save money. It is to reduce dependence on proprietary systems controlled elsewhere.
Will all this deliver “tech liberation”? Not immediately. The package does not remove American providers from the European market. Nor does it guarantee that European alternatives will emerge overnight. Building advanced semiconductor capacity, cloud infrastructure, and competitive software ecosystems takes years.
But the Commission sets a clearer direction. For decades, Europe’s digital policy focused on regulating technology built elsewhere. This package is different. It is about building. Whether Europe can turn sovereignty from a slogan into reality remains to be seen. But Brussels has now made its choice. The age of technological dependency is no longer something to manage. It is something to reduce.
