The EU seeks digital sovereignty, but the gap between research and industry remains
The Union has a strong capacity for innovation that it struggles to translate into applications. Commission plan to reduce dependence on the US
The presentation of the EU digital sovereignty package should arrive on Wednesday, after three postponements. The European Commission has been working on it for quite some time, trying on the one hand to harmonise the many regulations of the last few years (from the cloud to the Ai act, via microchips), and on the other hand to decrease dependence on US digital and Chinese material technologies.
The node is as simple as it is critical: according to Europarliament studies, over 80% of the products, services, infrastructures and digital intellectual property used in the Union come from non-EU countries, among which the US stands out. If we want to limit ourselves to the cloud alone, three US biggies (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) control about 69% of the European market, managing the infrastructures that host the services of public administrations, banks, telecommunication operators and companies. Translated: if one morning US President Donald Trump decided to revoke cloud licences across Europe, the entire continent would come to a standstill.
The not so unfounded concern in Brussels is that Washington will use technological dependence as a negotiating weapon to impose itself politically. Hence the Union's interest in 'disentangling' itself from US control as soon as possible. Creating local alternatives, however, is not enough: that European companies can compete with US big tech is not a plausible scenario. It is not only a matter of investment (which in any case
The Commission is trying a path that does not aim at zero dependency, but rather at managing it. An approach that betrays the European awareness of not being able to compete with US big tech. It is not just a matter of different investments: Europe is struggling to transform research, data, infrastructure and capital into autonomous industrial and technological capacity.
To realise this, one need only look at the calculations of the Ai Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano: out of all the world's scientific publications published in 2023, 15% were of European origin, against 9% in the USA. Yet when knowledge becomes industry, i.e. when it is translated into patents, the proportion is reversed: 14% of the patents registered in 2023 came from the States, against 3% from Europe.
