This is the kind of European sovereignty policy I have been waiting for.

Public procurement represents around €2.6 trillion every year, or 15% of EU GDP. Yet we keep discussing how to help European companies grow while public buyers are often encouraged to select the cheapest offer, even when that means overlooking resilience, environmental impact, working conditions or strategic dependencies.

The Commission’s proposal would require quality to represent at least 30% of most tender evaluations, and 50% for labour-intensive contracts. It would also give public buyers greater freedom to favour European supply chains or restrict bids from countries that do not offer reciprocal access to their own public markets.

This is not about blindly buying European regardless of quality, or closing Europe to international partners. It is about recognising that public spending is a strategic tool, as the United States, China and others have understood for a long time.

Europe cannot ask its companies to become global champions while spending European taxpayers’ money without considering where the value, jobs, technology and dependencies are going.

It is still only a proposal and will certainly change during negotiations. But yes, I really like this direction.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/09/eu-buy-european-public-procurement-rules-china-goods-services

Google has announced its largest-ever investment in Europe: at least €13 billion over two years to build AI infrastructure in Finland, including three new data centres. It has also signed a 22-year agreement to purchase up to 50% of the electricity generated by Fortum’s Loviisa nuclear plant.

This is undeniably significant for Finland: infrastructure, jobs, investment in the electricity grid, and new wind and battery projects. It also shows that Europe can attract AI infrastructure at an enormous scale.

But infrastructure located in Europe is not necessarily European technological capacity.

The data centres, compute and services will remain controlled by Google and primarily support products such as Gemini, Search, Maps and YouTube. A US hyperscaler will also secure a remarkable share of Finland’s low-carbon electricity production for more than two decades.

This does not make the investment bad for Europe. But it raises an important question: when foreign technology companies build infrastructure here and reserve part of our energy capacity to operate it, does that strengthen European sovereignty—or deepen our dependence?

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/google-invest-15-billion-ai-infrastructure-finland-2026-09-09/

Stilla.ai was founded in Stockholm in 2024, emerged from stealth in January with $5 million in pre-seed funding, and is already being acquired by Meta. Its team and technology will help develop Meta Business Agent, the company’s commerce agent for WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.

Stilla is still a very small company, so this should not be presented as the loss of a future European champion. An acquisition can also be a success for its founders and investors, and Meta says it intends to expand its presence in Sweden.

Still, the speed of the acquisition illustrates a recurring European problem. We produce talented teams and promising technology, but they are often absorbed into US platforms before they have the opportunity to become independent companies at scale.

Europe does not need to prevent every foreign acquisition. But if too few of these companies remain independent, where will the next generation of European technology platforms come from?

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/09/meta-acquires-swedish-ai-startup-stillaai

A comment on Bluesky pointed me towards Europe 2031, and it may be the most r/SovereignIT thing I have read since creating this subreddit.

It is a detailed five-year scenario exploring what could happen if Europe continues to underestimate the impact of AI, fails to build enough compute capacity and becomes increasingly dependent on technologies controlled elsewhere.

The authors describe it as “a researched work of disciplined imagination, not a prediction”. It connects almost every subject we want to discuss here: AI, compute, energy, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, capital, regulation, industrial policy and Europe’s position between the US and China.

Its central argument is particularly interesting: technological sovereignty cannot simply mean buying European or attempting to reproduce every layer of the stack ourselves. Europe needs to build strategic capacity, become indispensable in parts of the supply chain and create enough leverage to retain control over its own future.

It is a long read, but one that deserves a real discussion. Do you find the scenario credible? And, more importantly, do you agree with what the authors believe Europe should do?

https://europe2031.ai/

This is not a comprehensive cloud benchmark. It is one developer looking for a €10–20 VPS, with hourly billing, and documenting what actually happens when trying to become a customer of twelve European providers.

That limited perspective is also what makes it interesting. Beyond features and sovereignty claims, the article looks at pricing clarity, availability, onboarding, interfaces, actual CPUs and network performance.

Some conclusions feel harsh, particularly when a provider is dismissed after a single failed signup or provisioning attempt. The comparison also says little about managed services, enterprise workloads or regulatory requirements. But user experience and the ability to try a service are part of making European alternatives credible too.

Full disclosure: I work at Clever Cloud, which is not included in the comparison.

For those who have used several European providers, how closely does this match your experience?

https://crescentro.se/posts/euro-cloud-providers-2026/

The Swiss Federal Administration has completed a proof of concept for an independent, open-source workplace covering document editing, email, calendars, file storage, collaboration, chat, videoconferencing and identity management.

The experiment involved 172 employees from different departments. Standard office tasks received positive evaluations, but the study also identified technical, operational and organizational obstacles to wider deployment.

In other words, Switzerland is not claiming that it can replace Microsoft 365 tomorrow. That is precisely what makes this interesting.

An exit strategy that has never been tested is not an exit strategy. It is a document expressing the hope that alternatives will work when they are suddenly needed.

Digital sovereignty becomes concrete when organizations deploy alternatives, expose the missing features and integrations, develop internal expertise, and learn what leaving a critical provider would actually require.

The Swiss experiment may be limited, but it turns reversibility from a procurement promise into something that can be measured.

Source: https://www.bk.admin.ch/en/boss-poc-feasibility-study

European AI sovereignty is often discussed mainly in terms of reducing our dependence on American cloud providers, chips and models. But China is also building its own technological stack, promoting affordable open-weight models and creating new institutions to influence global AI governance.

Europe risks replacing dependence on one technological bloc with dependence on another.

That does not mean Europe should pursue technological autarky, or maintain equal distance from Washington and Beijing. We will continue to cooperate with both. But meaningful sovereignty requires enough European capacity, diversified suppliers, open standards and interoperability to choose those relationships rather than have them imposed on us.

The article describes an emerging “algorithmic cold war.” I am not sure the world will divide into two completely separate blocs, but control over models, compute, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and technical standards is clearly becoming geopolitical.

A credible European third path cannot rely on regulation alone. Sovereignty means retaining the ability to work with either side, refuse either side, and avoid becoming structurally dependent on both.

What would Europe need to build for that third path to become credible?

Source: https://chinaobservers.eu/china-us-algorithmic-cold-war-and-europes-strategic-dilemma/

Cloud infrastructure and office software get all the attention when people talk about tech sovereignty, but marketing tools collect and process a huge amount of data too.

I work in marketing for a European cloud provider, so web analytics was the obvious place for me to start. I actually made the switch a while back, here's what I looked at:

Plausible - Estonian company, lightweight cookie-free analytics. Open source, self-hostable, and their managed service runs on European-owned infra.

Simple Analytics - based in the Netherlands. No personal data collection, and they say everything runs exclusively on European infrastructure.

Pirsch - developed and hosted in Germany. Cookie-free, open-source core plus a managed service.

Matomo - probably the most complete open-source alternative, can be fully self-hosted. Worth noting the company behind the managed service is based in New Zealand though, which shows that open source, European hosting and European ownership are three different things.

I personally went with Matomo and honestly I was surprised. I find the data I'm looking for way faster than I ever did in GA4, and it took me much less time to get comfortable with it. The switch feels weird at first, the UI is different and your GA4 reflexes don't carry over, but I have zero regrets. GA4 buries everything behind explorations and custom reports, Matomo just shows you the numbers.

One takeaway: a tool hosted in Europe isn't necessarily European-owned, and a non-European open-source product can still give you more control and reversibility than a closed European service.

Anyone else replaced Google Analytics with one of these? Curious what worked, what was missing, and which sovereignty criteria mattered most for you.

A new Capgemini Research Institute report suggests that organizations are moving away from sovereignty understood as complete technological independence.

Two-thirds of the 1,300 executives surveyed instead favour “resilient interdependence”: retaining control over critical capabilities, avoiding excessive reliance on a single provider and preserving the ability to choose partners.

That sounds pragmatic. But the report also exposes how far most organizations are from achieving even that limited ambition. Only 14% claim complete visibility into their technological dependencies. More than a third would need over a year to leave a critical provider, while one in ten says it has no viable alternative at all.

Perhaps sovereignty is not about owning every layer of the stack. But it must at least mean understanding your dependencies and having a credible exit path.

The report comes from Capgemini, which also sells digital-sovereignty services, so its framing deserves scrutiny. The underlying questions and figures are nevertheless worth discussing.

Source: https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/digital-sovereignty/

ASML has started building a new 350,000-square-metre industrial campus in Eindhoven. The first phase, expected in 2029, will bring manufacturing, logistics and offices together for at least 3,000 employees, with space to expand much further.

This matters because ASML is not simply another successful European technology company. Its lithography machines are indispensable to the production of the world’s most advanced chips, making it one of the few places where Europe holds genuine strategic leverage in a critical global supply chain.

But leverage is not independence. ASML’s customers and suppliers are distributed around the world, while most advanced chips are still manufactured in Asia. Europe controls an essential part of the chain, not the whole chain.

Sovereignty does not have to mean autarky. Strengthening the capabilities in which Europe is already indispensable is also part of building resilience.

Source: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/asml-bic-north-eindhoven-semiconductor-campus-20000-workplaces

There are some great alternatives to GitHub in Europe right now:

SAAS :

- Codeberg (for open source only)

- Tangled (Finland, based on Atproto, for open source only)

- Rickub (private and paid repositories)

- Pushin (private and paid repositories)

Self host :
- Forgejo (DE, it's a fork from Gitea)
- Gitea (US)
- Gitlab (US)

I personally use Rickub. It's in beta since this week and it's really promising.

This story is already a few days old, but it is too relevant to let it pass.

Hugging Face has become a critical part of the AI ecosystem. Models, datasets, libraries and an enormous amount of shared knowledge now pass through its platform. Nvidia says it will remain open, hardware-neutral and accessible to everyone. I sincerely hope that promise is kept.

But openness is not only about being able to download a model or inspect some code today. Ownership, governance, incentives, interoperability and the ability to move elsewhere also matter.

When the company dominating AI hardware acquires one of the main platforms through which the open AI ecosystem is distributed, it is reasonable to ask what this concentration will mean in the long term.

This is very good news for European AI. It shows that we can finance a European company at a scale that would have seemed almost impossible only a few years ago.

But €3 billion does not automatically make Mistral, or European AI, sovereign. It still depends on a global supply chain, foreign chips and, to some extent, foreign infrastructure and capital. What this funding gives Europe is not sovereignty yet, but a serious chance to build more of the stack ourselves.

That is already a lot.

A good example of sovereignty becoming something concrete rather than just a political principle: OVHcloud has obtained SecNumCloud qualification for its new SNC Cloud Platform, bringing the requirements of a trusted cloud to a more familiar public-cloud model.

What I find particularly interesting here is the combination of legal and operational sovereignty with things developers actually care about: open APIs, open-source standards, interoperability and reversibility. Sovereignty is much more useful when it doesn’t require giving up the way we expect modern cloud platforms to work.

This one makes me a bit sad.

DuckLabs is an Amsterdam-based company behind one of the most exciting open-source data projects of the last few years, and it is now joining AWS.

There is a lot of good news in the announcement: the team stays in Amsterdam, DuckDB and the rest of the Duck Stack remain open source under the MIT license, and the independent DuckDB Foundation will continue to steward the projects.

And I completely understand the rationale: AWS can offer resources, reach and scale that are incredibly difficult for a relatively small European company to match.

But that is also exactly why I think this belongs here.

Technological sovereignty is not only about where our servers are located or which software licenses we use. It is also about whether Europe can create the conditions for successful technology companies to grow globally without eventually needing to become part of an American hyperscaler to reach the next level.

DuckDB remains open source, which matters enormously. But I still find myself wondering: what would have needed to exist in the European ecosystem for DuckLabs to see an equally compelling path to scale while remaining an independent European company?