The entanglement of technology and politics is impossible to ignore – especially in the United States, in which the boundaries between Silicon Valley and Washington quickly dissolve.
When President Trump is inaugurated, the CEOs of Amazon, Meta and Alphabet took prominent seats – even in front of cabinet candidates – an unmistakable sign of how closely the US Tech giants are now intertwined with the national political agendas. Just a few days earlier, the outgoing President Biden had warned of an increasing “Tech Industry complex”.
This is not just a symbolism. It reflects a broader shift: US technology companies correspond to a domestic industrial strategy that treats cloud, KI and digital infrastructure as tools of geopolitical power. For Europe, the effects are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
France’s AI and digital ministers have since warned European autonomy undermines digital “predators”. In Germany, government agencies have started leak out Microsoft teams in favor of domestic collaboration tools. And in Denmark, A nationwide migration There is an output for open source linux systems.
These are not isolated incidents. They signal the early stages of a digital sovereignty movement – one that was just as strongly driven by politics. For Europe, the recovery of control over the digital infrastructure is no longer an edge idea. It is a strategic imperative.
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A critical dependency
The dependence on Europe on foreign hyperscalers is deep and long -standing. The majority of state services, health systems and private infrastructures that are carried out on platforms that are controlled by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google. This trust is so anchored that it has been unnoticed for a long time.
Consider the US Cloud Act, which gives the American authorities the right to access data that is stored on servers in the USA, even if this data is in Europe. This creates a fundamental contradiction for EU citizens and companies: At the same time, your data is subject to local data protection laws such as the GDPR and the laws for foreign surveillance that you cannot influence.
The seller attracts the problem. Many organizations are connected to proprietary ecosystems with limited portability and cannot move or replicate the work loads on providers without significant costs or risks. Worse, surgical decisions such as product changes, pricing or data processing practices are increasingly made without European input.
The Cloud infrastructure has become a critical infrastructure. The question is no longer whether it is important who controls it, but what happens when these controls are thousands of miles away, in different jurisdiction with different interests.
Europe’s awakening
The European governments begin to act. France has started significant investments in domestic initiatives, which supports providers such as OvhCloud and invested in sovereign platforms with a “Secnumcloud” certification. Germany has now taken steps to reduce its dependence on non-European providers in all federal authorities. Denmark is not just about cost -saving people. It is about control, transparency and security – hardly surprisingly in view of Trump’s “interest” in Greenland.
These movements are not reactive or symbolic. They are part of a broader shift for digital self-determination-a that recognizes sovereignty as the basis for resilience. The digital future of Europe was outsourced for too long. Now there is a growing realization that real independence requires possession of the stack – from infrastructure and identity to data and application logic.
Resilience towards nationalism
This movement is not about an anti -American mood. It is also not an argument for economic protection. The European digital sovereignty is not a rejection of global cooperation – it is a re -calibration of the risk.
Governments and companies alike wake up to reality that resilience cannot be achieved by excessive dependence on a narrow series of providers. If the infrastructure is dominated by a handful of foreign providers, the system becomes brittle and not strong.
Europe should move to a more robust approach that defined by:
- Local hosting With a clear control of responsibility.
- Open standards This prevent the seller closure.
- Open source platforms This offers transparency and adaptability.
- Various provider ecosystems This promotes innovation and flexibility.
Especially for identity and access management, open protocols such as Oauth and OpenID Connect Multi-Cloud Orchestration enable. This means that if an organization has to change providers or hosts in a new region, its identity layer can remain consistent and safe – a crucial ability in a time of geopolitical turbulence and the acceleration of cyber threats.
A pragmatic path to digital sovereignty
The way to digital sovereignty does not require a revolution. But it requires focus and follow-through.
A practical approach begins with the examination of existing digital dependencies – not only at the infrastructure level, but also over the entire digital stack. From there, organizations should find out where resilience and portability are the weakest and where they are most exposed to external decisions about their control.
This assessment should influence a gradual diversification strategy. This could mean that the workloads gradually switch to sovereign clouds and use open source alternatives to the proprietary software or the decoupling of key components such as authentication or API management from individual bidder ecosystems.
Governments play a role, not only in politics and procurement, but also in the investments in skills and local innovation ecosystems. Sovereignty is not a checklisting element – it is a skill that is sustainably supported to build up and wait.
Choose the future
In a world in which digital systems underpinning every aspect of life, from education and healthcare to finance and national defense, infrastructure control is no longer a technical problem. It is a question of strategic independence.
Europe has the choice. Still rely on foreign platforms for its most sensitive digital functions or invest in a future that you can really own.
Sovereignty is not about isolation. It is about agency-the authorization to form a digital future that reflects European values, laws and long-term interests.
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