European tech industry coalition calls for ‘radical action’ on digital sovereignty — starting with buying local

A broad coalition drawn from across the ranks of Europe’s tech industry is calling for “radical action” from European Union lawmakers to shrink reliance on foreign-owned digital infrastructure and services to bolster the bloc’s economic prospects, resilience, and security in increasingly fraught geopolitical times.

In an open letter to European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU’s digital chief, Henna Virkkunen, which TechCrunch reviewed ahead of publication, more than 80 signatories (representing around 100 organizations) said they want regional lawmakers to rethink current support efforts so that they are centered on fostering uptake of homegrown alternatives with the strongest commercial potential — from apps, platforms, and AI models to chips, computing, storage, and connectivity.

Companies spanning areas including cloud, telecoms, defence, along with several regional business and startup associations, have put their names to the letter — which was sent to the Commission on Sunday — urging the bloc to switch its tech strategy onto a quasi-war footing by committing to support “sovereign digital infrastructure.”

The plan pushes for reducing reliance on foreign-owned Big Tech by actively fostering development of a so-called “Euro stack.” The European digital infrastructure pitch is not coming out of thin air — a Euro Stack paper written by, among others, the competition economist Cristina Caffarra was published in January fleshing out the strategy in some detail.

There has also been, over the last half year or so, a smattering of conference chatter turning over the potential for enterprising Europeans to seize a geopolitically fraught moment to press the case for the EU to adopt a digital industrial strategy that’s squarely focused on favoring local innovation.

The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.

Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.

“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.

“Trump switched off access to vital infrastructures because Ukraine was not ready to cede its land and hand over its minerals,” Oels said. “Europeans need sovereignty in critical infrastructures and those do not only consist of energy and health, but certainly also digital ones.”

Vance’s recent turn in Paris, at the AI Action summit, also saw the U.S. vice president lay into European lawmaking as a barrier to innovation, and a barrier to U.S. tech supremacy. His message boiled down to “do what we say or else” — as the Trump administration made it loud and clear it’s hell bent on retaining digital dominance as the world moves into an AI-accelerated era.

The industry letter isn’t only responding to external threats, though. It follows (and references) the 2024 Draghi report on EU competitiveness — which has caused much hand-wringing in European capitals over what to do about slowing regional growth, but less clearly tangible action. (Hence its author’s exasperated cry to lawmakers in the European Parliament just a few weeks ago — to “do something“.)

The coalition’s missive offers a European tech industry first stab prescription for action, combined with a stark warning of the perils of the bloc continuing as is.

Without urgent action to foster demand for European-made technologies ,there’s a risk that U.S. hyperscalers’ takeover of critical digital infrastructure provision in areas like cloud computing will be complete, Euro Stack backers suggest — explicitly predicting that: “Europe will lose out on digital innovation and productivity growth without sweeping and urgent change.”

“Our reliance on non-European technologies will become almost complete in less than three years at current rates,” they go on to warn.

So what is the specific something that this tech industry coalition is advocating for the EU to do?

Buy European

The letter suggests the bloc could help stoke demand and unlock investment by adopting public procurement requirements that would require at least a portion of public bodies’ digital requirements to come from local providers (aka a “Buy European” mandate — favoring “European-led and assembled solutions”).

“Industry will invest if there are adequate demand prospects,” the letter writers say, going on to suggest, “Prioritising areas where Europe can already deliver will be key to shifting resources fast to European suppliers, creating value and market in a virtuous circle.”

“The aim is not to exclude non-European players, but to create space where European suppliers can legitimately compete (and justify investment),” they add.

Caffarra dubs procurement requirements a “no brainer.”

“We need the public sector to be told to buy European, or mostly European,” she tells TechCrunch. “What’s so bad about that? Americans do buy American, Chinese buy Chinese — and we European say, ‘oh, buy everything by all means’.”

The argument is that in an “America First” world, where the world’s most powerful country can’t be counted upon to have Europe’s back anymore, the EU’s studious neutrality — vis-a-vis where it invests its resources — looks like a idealistic relic of a gentler age.

While the public sector could be given ‘Buy European’ mandates, for private sector buyers, Caffarra says a Euro Stack plan could include “inducements” to switch to homegrown providers — whether through vouchers or some other support mechanism. “Yes, they need to be subsidized, in some sense — but we’re not talking about enormous, enormous sums,” she suggests.

Pooling and federating

Other recommendations set out in the letter include the EU taking steps to enable “viable supply” by encouraging European technologists to adopt a “pooling and federating” approach, including the development of common standards — as a strategy to accelerate scaling of homegrown digital infrastructure.

By working together on aligned approaches, the aim is to dial up European providers’ ability to compete against the likes of U.S. hyperscalers, such as in the case of cloud computing.

“This means again working with industry to inventory resources fast, supporting open source solutions and interoperability (both technically and commercially), aggregating ‘best of breed’ existing assets, supporting onboarding with integration platforms and low compliance barriers — while meeting localization and security imperatives,” the letter suggests — advocating for priority be given to “projects that address basic infrastructural needs, such as hardware autonomy and sovereign cloud and platforms.”

While there have been past attempts in this direction — notable, the Gaia-X effort launched back in 2020 which was aimed at powering up a European cloud to rival U.S. and Chinese providers — that digital sovereignty push was effectively defanged once U.S. hyperscalers got let in.

“When AWS and Microsoft in particular, and Google, got into Gaia-X, they blew it up from inside,” notes Caffarra.

The letter also takes a stab at articulating why it’s so self-defeating for Europe to roll out the welcome mat to foreign hyperscalers whose expansionist, proprietary playbook is all about maximizing customer lock-in and rent extraction.

“With non-European corporations extracting value and concentrating power through proprietary technologies, ‘openness’ (open science, standards, data) should be a pillar of Europe’s digital sovereign strategy,” it contends.

Signatories are also pushing the EU to support the development of harmonized requirements for public/private cloud users to opt to use “sovereign cloud services” for storing their sensitive data (such as a certification scheme) — which is also framed as a security measure to guard against non-EU extraterritorial laws that might pose a risk to European data.

They also want the bloc to review its existing EU Digital Decade strategy — and, where necessary, repurpose existing plans to ensure funding is going to “tangible, market relevant, result-oriented projects”, as they put it.

Furthermore, the letter calls for the EU to assess projects for potential funding through a business outcomes lens — e.g. by using key performance indicators, critical success factors etc — in order to ensure that EU funds go to services with “strong adoption prospects.”

Redirecting and concentrating EU support on homegrown tech infrastructure that has the strongest potential to scale is core to the plan.

Sovereign infrastructure fund

On funding, the letter makes a call for the EU to set up a “Sovereign Infrastructure Fund” to support public investments in European digital infrastructure — especially in capital intensive areas of the tech value chain (such as chips and quantum computing).

Caffarra argues that such a fund wouldn’t require huge amounts of money — smaller amounts could be strategically targeted, she suggests, such as towards maintaining open source infrastructure.

“The open source community in Europe is enormous and incredibly, incredibly capable,” she argues.

She also dismisses suggestions that there would be eye-wateringly high costs for implementing Euro Stack overall — such as the €5 trillion+ price-tag that’s been floated by U.S. trade group, Chamber of Progress, which counts several U.S. tech giants as members — emphasizing that this isn’t a call to rip out and replace everything. Rather it’s a plea to Europe to get on the same page and work collectively on a joined-up digital industrial strategy with the goal of increasing local capacity by building demand for foundational technologies that European companies are already able to provide.

By locking in future demand, the Euro Stack pitch is that this will foster more local tech industry growth and innovation — while helping the bloc chart a course towards greater autonomy in critical digital infrastructure.

Still, on investment Caffarra concedes that there are “other things that need to be done” — pointing to how many European entrepreneurs end up crossing the pond to look for VC funding, for example.

“A sovereign fund that invests in European startups? Heck yeah, we should have that,” she adds, while still arguing that the sums involved can be relatively small, such as by focusing on early stage startups (vs showering “helicopter money” on established companies).

Rethinking who leads

While the EU has been talking some of the talk on digital sovereignty under von der Leyen’s presidency, the Euro Stack coalition is essentially dismissing current efforts in this direction as poorly directed and, ultimately, wasted.

Too much funding is flowing towards academia and experimental R&D in their analysis vs tangible commercial efforts — which, given the right support to scale, could actually achieve the goal of strategic autonomy in digital infrastructure, is the suggestion. Hence why the letter is pushing the EU hard to accept an industry-led effort to turn this tanker vs continuing with top-down policymaking business as usual.

Caffarra’s assessment of the EU’s record on digital sovereignty is particularly withering — she dubs its approach “useless” and argues that, for example, the EU’s recent push to set up so called “AI factories“, as an AI ecosystem-building measure, is too reliant on academic consortia to deliver anything that’s commercially valuable.

The letter is a little less plain-speaking. But it’s essentially making the same appeal for the bloc’s lawmakers to get out of the way when it comes to critical decision-making in relation to Europe’s dwindling digital infrastructure prospects — and instead lean into their “convening powers to mobilise industry to actively help coordinate and validate a continent-wide strategy to power a European digital sovereign effort,” as it puts it.

“To support Europe in this acute moment of crisis for our security and strategic autonomy, the Commission must urgently form and convene working groups with industry to transform its tech sovereignty ambition into concrete actions,” the industry coalition suggests.

TechCrunch reached out to the European Commission for a response to the Euro Stack pitch paper but at the time of writing it had not responded.

Industry voices

A full list of signatories is included at the bottom of the letter — but Caffarra sums up the collective ink as “practically all of Europe’s cloud, telcos, software, open source etc, plus industrial giants like Airbus and defence like Dassault Systemes.”

She expects more companies to join as backers in the coming days (including from Europe’s AI ecosystem), but also claims that some that wanted to back the call didn’t sign as they’re worried about retaliation from Big Tech since they are also their customers. (And it’s worth noting that French AI giant Mistral, which isn’t currently a signatory to the letter, recently made its own plea for shrinking dependency on U.S. suppliers by buying European — even as CEO and founder Arthur Mensch said “pragmatism” is needed as some digital infrastructure can’t be acquired any other way).

As well as tech companies, a range of regional business associations have put their name to the letter — including the likes of Connect Europe (representing telcos), the OSBA (Open Source Business Alliance), European Digital SME Alliance, European Startup Network, and France Digitale to name a few.

On startups Caffarra agrees that for some European entrepreneurs and their investors achieving an exit to U.S.-owned Big Tech is the endgame — which could create some tension when it comes to supporting a strategy that’s explicitly pulling in the other direction. (She name-checked one startup association that didn’t sign as she said its members were open about their hopes to get “in bed with Big Tech” — but we’ll spare their blushes.)

“That’s one way out,” she adds of this Big Tech exit playbook. “I’m not preventing that — I’m saying that there needs to be European alternatives to it.”

Europe first?

Discussing why he’s backing the Euro Stack proposal, Johan Christenson, founder of European cloud provider Cleura (formerly City Network) — and now head of technology at the Swedish cloud provider Iver (another signatory), which acquired City Network in 2020 — tells TechCrunch: “The changes needed are so foundational I think Europe needs a new Airbus-like project around digital to stand a chance.”

“While protectionism is growing in various places — I think Europe needs to think different. By setting requirements such as use of open source or that a chat tool or video conference system need to be interoperable with all others,” he goes on. “Or making sure extensions in productivity tools adhere to standards approved by Europe — so Libre office always will work great with Word or Power Point for instance.

“There needs to be some element of public procurement requirement as well.”

Any Yen, founder of Switzerland-based privacy tools maker Proton — another signatory to the letter — also says a big shift of mindset is needed.

“Historically the idea of thinking ‘Europe First’ has been taboo, looked down on as being unseemly. And while the impulse to set a global example and ‘play fair’ is admirable, it’s naive and has left Europe at a disadvantage,” he warns, adding: “America and China have always been America First and China First, Europe needs to do the same.

“European tech hasn’t fallen behind due to a lack of skill, talent or creativity. It’s fallen behind because of a lack of demand. For 30 years, European governments and companies have made the shortsighted decision to procure technology from the U.S. and China for short term cost savings, rather than making the strategic choice of investing in developing European capabilities.

“Fixing this demand problem is most easily done by requiring that European public sector buy European, creating the impetus for the development of Europe’s tech sector.”

Yen says the demand situation is so critical Europe needs not to level the playing field but actively tilt it in favor of homegrown tech. “This is most easily done by fixing the demand problem by requiring public procurement (and perhaps even private procurement) to buy European,” he suggests.

Asked about the impact of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — the bloc’s flagship competition reform that’s been up and running since March 2024. aiming to drive market contestability on Big Tech dominance — Yen says he does not think the regulation is sufficient on its own. Hence Proton backing the Euro Stack call for more radical action.

“We see that now one year after the introduction of DMA, where nothing has materially changed and the marketshare of Big Tech in Europe is also unchanged,” he tells TechCrunch. “Simply put, even if DMA can shave a point off of American GDP through fines, it will do little to grow European GDP as it does not fundamentally create the demand necessary for GDP growth.”

He also doesn’t mince his words in assessment the performance of the Commission — arguing it’s “prioritizing the Europe of the past instead of looking towards the Europe of the future.”

“Successive generations of European entrepreneurs with the vision of what has to be done have come and gone and have been saying the same thing for decades — perhaps now is the time to start listening to them,” Yen adds.

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of German cloud services player Nextcloud — another letter signatory — emails a long list of answers when asked why he believes Europe needs a new approach and what are the risks of just doing more of the same, flagging a raft of data security and privacy risks, along with the looming threat of economic “blackmail” under the boot of an America First U.S. administration.

“The U.S. executive right now is showing they have no qualms using executive power, from tariffs to sanctions, to achieve completely unrelated goals,” he notes, adding: “More than ever before, U.S. cloud services can be a chokehold for political, economic or other reasons. And organizations are looking for better options.”

Changing European procurement rules to, for example, set a requirement that “critical infrastructure” must be 50-80% open source in a year or two would not cost the tax payer anything, Karlitschek suggests, but “would create an explosion of new startups and innovation” since European tech firms are better positioned to capitalize vs U.S. counterparts (which skew towards proprietary, rather than open source).

“More government contracts must be awarded to European open source companies,” he also suggests, noting recent moves by the German government in this direction, and arguing: “Digital sovereignty can only be achieved with open source software.”

Karlitschek also lauds efforts to agree standards that make it easier to move work loads from one cloud provider to another.

“One example is the recently launched open cloud industry standard API specification SECA which allows to deploy and run workloads seamlessly across different cloud environments,” he notes. “This enables the many European service providers to collectively form a network with greater scalability and continuity than each can provide individually.

“Similarly, smaller vendors can and should be encouraged to pool resources together into joint offerings, giving the public sector and large businesses more certainty in terms of continuity.”

In further remarks, Karlitschek calls for the EU to properly enforce its existing suite of digital regulations against Big Tech — “from privacy to antitrust rules” — suggesting robust action on compliance could help move the needle. “The Big Tech firms are not facing many consequences for their gatekeeping and some fundamental issues around privacy are not addressed,” he points out.

However Caffarra has no truck with such fiddling sideshows. She’s convinced that a far bigger shift of mindset is needed; one that demands the EU get the heck out of its regulatory comfort zone.

“They are regulating the top [of the stack] — search, social networks, e-commerce and app stores; these are the things that the DMA is focused on. These are the products,” she emphasizes, when asked why the EU robustly enforcing its existing rules isn’t the answer to digital autonomy. “We are talking about infrastructure that lies below it — so compute, cloud, connectivity, chips. So the DMA is not bothered with that.”

The key point that the regions’ lawmakers must grok and fast is that almost all tech infrastructure is now outside European control, warns Caffarra — and that calls for a radical new survival strategy, not a tweak of the dial.