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Europe’s Sovereign Tech Package will still fall short without international partnerships

The European Union’s new Sovereign Tech Package deserves to be welcomed. For many years, Europe’s digital policy was defined primarily by its ability to regulate technologies developed elsewhere. The EU became an influential rule-maker, but remained far less successful at building the companies on which the digital economy increasingly depends. The Sovereign Tech Package is the attempt to change that.

This shift did not appear from nowhere. It owes much to the persistent work of policy analysts and open-source advocates who have argued that Europe cannot depend fully on foreign providers for the essential infrastructure of its economy, public administration and security. The EuroStack initiative has been particularly influential in giving this debate a clearer vocabulary. Its central message was that Europe needs more than isolated projects or another series of regulatory interventions. It needs a connected technological ecosystem that spans chips, cloud infrastructure, software, data, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and digital public infrastructure.

The Sovereign Tech Package shows that this argument has reached the centre of European policymaking. The European Commission now describes technological sovereignty as Europe’s ability to act independently in the digital world by developing and controlling key technologies, data and infrastructure and reducing its reliance on non-EU providers. It acknowledges that the EU currently depends on non-European countries for more than 80 per cent of key digital products.

The package therefore marks real progress. It shows that efforts of policy analysts pay off. This is exactly the reason why I write this newsletter. But I am convinced that the package will not achieve its objectives in its current form. Its main weakness is not one of ambition, but of perspective. Europe is attempting to respond to a global and networked dependency problem through an approach that remains overwhelmingly inward-looking. The package asks how Europe can build more technology in Europe, procure more European technology and reduce its exposure to foreign providers.

The Sovereign Tech Package is exactly this industrial policy and economic security policy that I have been writing about in my last newsletter articles. And it is a concrete example of how Europe looks to protect and to promote their industries, but the third pillar “partner” remains an afterthought.

International partnerships are mentioned in the package, as they are now mentioned in almost every European strategy. However, they remain marginal. To my mind, this is more than a missed opportunity. Given the scale of Europe’s technological dependencies and the investment gap it faces it is unlikely that Europe will achieve its objectives on its own.

The Sovereign Tech Package: Objectives, Pillars and Instruments

The package, presented by the European Commission on 3 June 2026, consists of two legislative proposals and two strategic initiatives. Together, they seek to strengthen Europe’s capabilities across the technology stack, from semiconductors and computing infrastructure to cloud services, software and the energy systems required to sustain an increasingly digital economy.

Chips Act 2.0

Main objective: Strengthen Europe’s semiconductor base, improve supply-chain resilience and support the chips required for Europe’s AI and industrial ambitions.

Instruments: Measures to stimulate supply and demand for European chips, improve investment conditions, accelerate permitting, support cutting-edge and mainstream semiconductor technologies, create technology-focused “Grand Challenges”, and strengthen the links between European chip producers and industrial users.

Investment needs: The Commission estimates that around €120 billion in public and private investment may be required for the semiconductor sector by 2035, including substantial investment in advanced manufacturing capacity.

Cloud and AI Development Act

Main objectives: Expand Europe’s cloud, AI and data-centre capacity while reducing strategic dependence on non-EU cloud providers.

Instruments: Support for next-generation cloud and AI technologies, faster deployment of sustainable data centres, national cloud and AI strategies, Experience and Acceleration Centres for AI, a common European procurement framework, and a four-level sovereignty assurance framework for cloud and AI services.

Investment needs: Europe is expected to require around €200 billion in investment to expand cloud and AI data-centre capacity by 2036. The Act aims to help at least triple EU data-centre capacity within five to seven years.

EU Open Source Strategy

Main objectives: Make open source a central component of Europe’s technological sovereignty, cybersecurity, innovation capacity and public-sector digitalisation.

Instruments: Support for European open-source ecosystems, greater uptake of open alternatives, improved maintenance and security, stronger procurement pathways, and increased use of open and interoperable technologies in public administration.

Investment needs: The strategy recognises that open source requires long-term investment in maintenance, governance, security and adoption, rather than being treated simply as software available at no cost.

Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy

Main objectives: Ensure that Europe’s energy system can support digital infrastructure while using digital technologies and AI to modernise the energy sector itself.

Instruments: Measures to integrate data centres into the energy system, accelerate secure European AI solutions for energy, improve the digitalisation of grids, and align the growth of computing infrastructure with sustainability and energy-security objectives.

Investment needs: The roadmap addresses the wider investment challenge created by the growing energy demand of data centres, AI infrastructure and semiconductor production.

Europe’s uphill battle cannot be won through an inward-looking strategy alone

If technological sovereignty is understood primarily as replacing foreign dependencies with technologies produced entirely within Europe, the EU has chosen a very steep hill to climb. The market and data that fuels the most important digital products is a global one. Replacing foreign dependencies with European companies while at the same time guaranteeing access to the best available technologies would mean to establish European global players. Achieving this objective in multiple layers of the digital technology stack is not realistic.

The objective of EU’s Sovereign Tech Package is therefore not technological autarky. Sovereignty is better understood as the capacity to act, choose, negotiate and adapt without being trapped by single points of dependency. A sovereign Europe does not need to produce every component itself, but it must have credible alternatives, sufficient control over critical systems and the ability to build resilient ecosystems with partners whose interests are compatible with its own.

This is precisely where the limited role of international partnerships becomes difficult to understand. Dependency can be reduced by diversifying relationships, jointly developing alternatives and building shared capabilities with trusted partners. This principle is understood by EU’s policy-makers but not applied.

From EuroStack and Global Gateway to digital sovereignty in partnership

I have been proposing to combine the objectives of EuroStack and Global Gateway for some time now because I believe Europe continues to separate two policy agendas that should increasingly be understood as one. On the one hand, the EU discusses Tech Sovereignty. On the other hand, it discusses Global Gateway. The institutional separation may be understandable, but practically, this puts the realization of both agendas at risk.

Many of Europe’s partner countries face the same dependency problems as the EU. They also rely on foreign cloud providers, proprietary platforms, imported software and digital infrastructures that they do not fully control. Their governments are equally concerned about the sovereignty of public data, the affordability of digital systems, the risk of vendor lock-in and the need to create foundations for artificial intelligence. They are looking for ways to modernise public administration, develop digital public infrastructure and participate more actively in the data economy.

The overlap of interests is substantial. Instead of developing sovereign technologies in Europe and later seeking to export them, the EU could build them with partners from the outset. Global Gateway could become an external pillar of a broader EuroStack approach, not merely by financing connectivity or the deployment of European products, but by supporting technology development partnerships. Such partnerships could bring together European companies, public institutions, open-source communities, universities and partner-country organisations to develop systems that respond to shared needs and can be used across multiple markets.

This would be a different model of international cooperation. It would move beyond the assumption that Europe develops technologies and other countries adopt them. It would recognise that co-development can create better products, larger user communities, more diverse implementation experience and stronger political relationships. It would also help Europe build scale. A sovereign European technology ecosystem that is designed only for the European market may struggle to compete with global platforms. An ecosystem developed with trusted partners across regions would have a different potential.

This is what I mean by partnership-based industrial policy. Industrial policy should not stop at the border, particularly when the technologies in question depend on networks, standards, data flows and communities of users. Partnerships should not be a diplomatic addition to a strategy whose real substance remains national or European. They should shape the strategy from the beginning.

The Sovereign Tech Package does not reject this idea. The Cloud and AI Development Act explicitly states that much of the market should remain open to partners, and Chips Act 2.0 refers to cooperation with strategic partners. The wider EU digital policy framework also contains an International Digital Strategy and repeated commitments to mutually beneficial partnerships. The problem is not the absence of partnership language. The problem is the difference between language and operational priority. When the package is examined in detail, the main instruments focus on what Europe will build, finance, procure and protect internally. Partnerships remain supportive rather than constitutive.

A Practical Example: An Open-Source Data Mesh Developed Through International Cooperation

My concern is not based only on theoretical reflection. I encounter the gap between Europe’s internal technology agenda and its international cooperation activities in my own work.

Together with partners, we have been working on a modern open-source data mesh platform. The system originated in the context of epidemic surveillance and One Health cooperation the East African region. The platform combines open-source technologies widely used in modern data engineering and integrates them into a easily deployabe system for end-to-end data integration, analysis and governance.

The platform has already been used in demanding environments. In the IGAD region, it supported cross-country sharing and analysis of COVID-19 data across more than seven countries and contributed to responses to Ebola and Mpox outbreaks. In Cameroon, the One Health Platform adapted the original code to pilot the Cameroon One Health Information System, COHIS. Data analysts from multiple sectors can now integrate data and automate analysis step by step. At the African Union level, AU-IBAR and Africa CDC are also adopting the software.

Governments and companies everywhere struggle with fragmented information systems, unclear data governance, limited interoperability and the difficulty of making operational data available for secondary use. The same problems affect healthcare, social protection, transport, environmental management, supply chains and public administration. They also determine whether organizations can make meaningful use of artificial intelligence. AI strategies are of limited value if data remains inaccessible, poorly structured or trapped in isolated systems.

This is why the project is relevant to Europe’s sovereignty debate. It is a potentially transformative open-source software project that addresses many of the questions now at the centre of the Sovereign Tech Package. It offers public institutions greater control over their data infrastructure, reduces dependence on individual vendors, allows systems to be adapted to national requirements and creates a foundation for interoperability, analytics and AI-ready data management.

A modern open-source data mesh platform that has been tested in complex multi-institutional settings should therefore be of interest to European policymakers. Yet the worlds remain remarkably disconnected. European international cooperation can support the development and deployment of such a platform in Africa, while European technology policy discusses open source, sovereign infrastructure and public-sector digitalisation in a largely separate institutional universe. A technology developed with European support in Cameroon that may be a high-value use cases in Europe, is categorised primarily as a development project.

That is a missed opportunity for everyone involved. International cooperation remains separated from economic security, while Europe’s internal technology strategy overlooks capabilities that it has already helped to create.

Why partnerships remain an afterthought

The reasons for this disconnect are multifold, but at its heart lies a persistent misunderstanding of the world and of Europe’s position within it. European institutions increasingly speak about equal partnerships. However, many of the assumptions underlying technology cooperation remain shaped by a much older model in which knowledge and innovation originate in Europe and move outward.

Countries in what is often called the Global South, and what I prefer to call the Global Majority, are still too frequently perceived as markets or beneficiaries of development cooperation rather than as places where valuable technological capabilities are being developed. This perception is increasingly detached from reality. Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, companies and public institutions are building digital public infrastructure, deploying open-source platforms and solving problems that Europe itself is trying to address.

The difficulty many people have in imagining that a modern digital tool deployed in Cameroon could be relevant for a sophisticated European use case is not primarily a technical problem. It is a cognitive one. It reflects an outdated assumption about the direction in which innovation is supposed to flow.

Europe's share of the global economy (purchasing power parity) was 14% in 2025. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) already have a larger share of the world economy than the USA and the EU combined, and due to the higher economic growth in the BRICS, the economic balance of power will shift even further. If economic growth continues at the same rate, India's economy (PPP) will be as large as that of the EU in 20 years.

Post-colonial thinking is usually discussed in Europe as a moral question concerned with power asymmetries and historical responsibility. But Post-colonial thinking is also a strategic liability. It prevents Europe from recognising capabilities where they exist, narrows the circle of partners it considers credible and makes European institutions less able to build the alliances they need.

A second reason is that the international cooperation community has not yet fully understood the implications of economic security. For decades, development cooperation has been framed around poverty reduction and global public goods. Many cooperation institutions have not yet made a conceptual shift. Digital projects continue to be implemented as development projects, even when they create technologies, standards and infrastructure that may be relevant to Europe’s own economic security. The people responsible for Europe’s internal technology strategy may never encounter the work being done through international cooperation, while those implementing cooperation projects may not see their activities as part of a wider industrial or sovereignty agenda. The result is a policy gap between two communities that should be working much more closely together.

There is also a more practical reason why partnerships remain secondary: they are difficult. A European industrial policy instrument can be designed around European institutions. A genuine technology development partnership requires Europe and its partners to clarify what they want, negotiate their interests, agree on governance, address intellectual property, align standards, develop procurement pathways and build trust. It requires more time than a national or regional policy, and it introduces uncertainty into a process that institutions often prefer to control.

This complexity is real, but it is not a reason to avoid partnerships. Partnerships cannot remain a rhetorical gesture added after the main policy has already been designed. They must become part of the architecture of technological sovereignty itself.

Sovereignty through partnership

The Sovereign Tech Package is an important step in the right direction. At the same time, Europe’s technological dependency is too deep, the investment challenge too large and the global competition too intense for an inward-looking strategy to succeed on its own. Europe needs to strengthen its domestic capabilities, but it also needs to operationalize sovereignty through carefully designed interdependence.

I will continue to write about this because I am convinced that Europe and its partners can achieve much more together than our current institutional structures allow us to imagine. The future of technological sovereignty will not be built by Europe, India or Nigeria in isolation. It will be built through partnerships, and Europe’s and other countries’ ability to recognise that may determine whether the technological sovereignty remains an ambition or reality.