The EU’s tech chief has warned that AI has become a geopolitical weapon, pushing for Europe to develop its own alternatives.
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Brussels last month presented a tech sovereignty package to loosen its dependence on US technology by backing European alternatives in sectors from semiconductors and cloud computing to AI.
The plan has incentives to accelerate the construction of European data centres and favour homegrown cloud and AI technologies, such as the AI company Mistral or cloud providers such as Scaleway or OVHcloud.
“It’s so important also that Europe is building up our own capacities and that we are not dependent on third countries for these very critical technologies,” Virkkunen said.
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In order to finance those investments, the EU and the European Investment Bank will set up a new mechanism to make strategic investments in European tech companies.
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The “kill switch” risk is the clearest political image. “If a foreign government can require a provider to cut access, change model availability, restrict compute exports or expose data under national law, European users face a dependency that is not merely commercial. It becomes strategic,” writes EUToday in a an article covering the issue.
If European institutions and governments want domestic or trusted AI capacity, they must create demand. That could mean buying European models for public administration, supporting sovereign cloud frameworks and funding compute infrastructure through EU-European Investment Bank mechanisms.
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Virkkunen’s warning should therefore be read as a policy marker. Europe is no longer discussing AI sovereignty only to create champions. It is asking whether critical functions can be interrupted from outside the Union. That is a harder and more practical question.
The next phase will be judged by execution rather than vocabulary. Europe has no shortage of strategies on cloud, data and AI; the test is whether they translate into compute capacity, procurement demand and viable companies able to serve public and private clients at scale.
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