When the European Union adopted the GDPR in 2018, it established itself as the global benchmark in digital regulation. The Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act and then the AI Act have confirmed this position. Faced with American technology giants and the rapid rise of China, Brussels has chosen to set the rules of the game rather than trying to produce its own champions.
The package on technological sovereignty presented this week marks a change of direction. Behind the Chips Act 2.0, the regulation on the development of the cloud and artificial intelligence, the open source strategy and the roadmap on energy and AI, the European Commission no longer seeks only to regulate technologies, but now intends to participate in their construction.
It should be remembered that for two decades, the Union considered that its strength lay in its single market, its normative capacity and its regulatory power. Today, she believes that these levers are no longer sufficient in the face of an international environment where technology has become an instrument of economic, industrial and geopolitical power.
Ursula von der Leyen summarizes this development: “We cannot afford to depend on other players for the technologies that ensure the functioning of our hospitals, the stability of our energy networks and the security of our services. » The subject is no longer just digital competitiveness. It has become that of controlling the infrastructures essential to the functioning of the economy.
This development can be explained firstly by a series of successive shocks. The pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of global supply chains. Semiconductor shortages have paralyzed part of European industry. The energy crisis following the invasion of Ukraine exposed the risks associated with excessive reliance on strategic resources controlled by external powers. Finally, the rise of artificial intelligence has demonstrated that the most advanced technologies now rely on considerable physical infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence is no longer just about algorithms, it relies on advanced semiconductors, data centers, power grids, cloud infrastructures and increasing volumes of data.
AI has become a capital-intensive industry, and it is precisely this reality that structures the entire package presented by the Commission.
The first signal lies in the place given to semiconductors. With the Chips Act 2.0, Brussels is seeking to consolidate an industry that is already strategic for Europe, particularly around players like ASML, STMicroelectronics and Infineon. The objective is not only to secure supplies. It is also about ensuring that Europe retains a role in the global value chain of components that power data centers, networks and artificial intelligence systems.
The second pillar concerns cloud infrastructures and computing capacities. For years, Europe let American hyperscalers largely dominate the market. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud today represent the majority of infrastructures used by European companies. The new regulation on the development of the cloud and AI reflects the desire to reduce this dependence by promoting the emergence of infrastructures capable of supporting the development of European models.
This ambition is directly linked to the explosion in demand for computing caused by generative artificial intelligence. Europe no longer only wants to be a consumer market for models developed elsewhere. It seeks to have its own computing capabilities, an essential condition for the emergence of a competitive ecosystem.
The presence of a strategy dedicated to open source in this package is not insignificant either. Brussels now considers free software as a strategic asset. In a context marked by the growing concentration of digital infrastructures in the hands of a few global players, open source appears to be a means of preserving independent innovation capacity and limiting certain technological dependencies.
The most telling change, however, concerns energy. Until now, energy and digital policies have been treated as two separate areas. The Commission now establishes a direct link between the two. Data centers are considered critical infrastructure. Electricity becomes a strategic resource for artificial intelligence and electricity networks become assets of digital sovereignty.
Artificial intelligence will not be able to develop without access to abundant, competitive and carbon-free energy. Commission projections show that the installed capacity of European data centers could more than double by the end of the decade. This growth comes at a time when the electrification of transport, industry and heating is already increasing pressure on the networks.
Digital sovereignty now requires the ability to produce, transport and distribute the electricity necessary for the AI economy and the European Union is now trying to build its own response.
Its specificity lies in the search for a balance between economic openness and reduction of strategic dependencies. The Commission is not seeking to close the European market, but to guarantee that certain critical capabilities can be developed and exploited within the territory of the Union.
This ambition marks a break with the previous phase of European digital construction; the package presented this week now concerns the conditions of their production.
The question that now arises is no longer doctrinal, but industrial. Because behind the texts are considerable investments in factories, data centers, electricity networks, cloud infrastructures and computing capacities. What are the means that will be mobilized to deploy a sufficiently offensive policy to reposition itself at the heart of the AI revolution.
