Brussels likes to talk sovereignty. The market, however, keeps buying American.
This is not a failure of ambition. Nor is it a failure of technological capability. It is a failure of alignment. Europe’s political narrative points in one direction; its economic behaviour moves in another.
Technological sovereignty has become a central pillar of Europe's strategic agenda. Yet the bulk of spending in cloud, software, and cybersecurity continues to flow to non-European providers. Today, Non-EU cloud providers hold about 70% of the EU market. The contradiction is no longer anecdotal. It is structural.
Inertia offers a partial explanation. Companies are locked into existing infrastructures. Migrating critical workloads is costly, slow, and risky But this only explains so much. If European alternatives were clearly competitive—on performance, reliability, or trust—companies would make the leap and absorb switching costs.
The more uncomfortable truth is that the gap reflects deeper structural weaknesses. Europe does not lack ideas or talent. It lacks scale, market confidence, and, ultimately, credibility.
Europe’s own market design deepens the problem. What policymakers celebrate as diversity, companies experience as fragmentation. Twenty-seven national ecosystems, diverging industrial priorities, and uneven investment patterns create an environment where scaling is the exception, not the rule.
Sovereignty, if narrowly interpreted, can undermine resilience.
European innovators in space, AI or advanced computing still depend on non-European infrastructure at critical stages—satellite launches, cloud processing, high-performance computing. These dependencies are not abstract. They shape timelines, constrain deployment, and erode strategic autonomy.
The implication is clear. Sovereignty cannot be defined as a blanket objective across entire value chains. It must be prioritised. Control over critical nodes—compute capacity, secure data infrastructure, access to space—matters more than symbolic autonomy elsewhere.
Europe’s economic model is built on openness, competition, and interoperability. Technological sovereignty, by contrast, requires degrees of control, prioritisation, and selective restriction. These logics rarely align.
The way forward, therefore, cannot be doctrinal. A blanket preference for localisation or European providers would be both inefficient and counterproductive. Instead we should opt for an approach that enables sovereignty where it is critical, openness where it remains advantageous.
Sensitive infrastructures may require European control and data localisation. Less critical domains can remain globally integrated.
Three conclusions follow.
First, Europe’s core constraint is not innovation but scale and demand.
Second, sovereignty is not achieved through declarations. It requires sustained investment, strategic procurement, and prioritisation.
Third, cost, convenience, and fragmentation continue to outweigh strategic considerations. As long as this hierarchy persists, the market will keep contradicting the policy, and sovereignty will remain aspirational.
The EU and its members need to pool their resources and overcome so-called national interest and support their economic actors by creating demand, opting for their alternatives and helping them penetrate non-European markets, too.
