Europe Launches Bold Plan to Break Free From US and Asian Tech Dominance

2026-06-11 semicon

Brussels, Thursday, 11 June 2026.
The European Commission unveiled its Tech Sovereignty Package on June 3, 2026, targeting a stark reality: US giants AWS, Microsoft, and Google control 70% of Europe’s cloud market, while Europe produces just 10% of the world’s semiconductors.

A Continent Waking Up to Its Own Vulnerability

The numbers tell a sobering story. As of June 2026, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together control approximately 70% of the European cloud market, while European providers — led by SAP and Deutsche Telekom, each holding just 2% — have seen their collective share fall from 29% in 2017 to just 15% by June 6, 2026 [5]. In the semiconductor space, the picture is equally stark: Europe produces only around 10% of chips globally, and for the most advanced chips — those powering artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and supercomputing — the continent is almost entirely dependent on producers in Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States [4]. It was against this backdrop that the European Commission, on June 3, 2026, unveiled its European Technological Sovereignty Package in Brussels, a sweeping legislative and strategic initiative designed to fundamentally rebalance Europe’s position in the global technology landscape [1][5].

What the Package Actually Contains

The Tech Sovereignty Package is not a single law but a cluster of interlocking measures. At its legislative core sit two formal proposals: the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) [1]. Alongside these, the Commission has also introduced an Open Source Strategy and a Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy, the latter focusing on AI-driven solutions for smarter electricity grids, accelerated rollout of smart meters, and sovereign AI models trained on European data by European companies [1][7]. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framed the package in unambiguous terms: “We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure. This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices. Europe has the talent, the research excellence, the industrial base and the Single Market. Together, we must turn these strengths into technological sovereignty” [1][7]. The two legislative proposals are currently being negotiated by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU [7].

Semiconductors at the Centre: Chips Act 2.0 and the ASML Advantage

This article focuses on the semiconductor dimension of the package — arguably the most strategically consequential pillar. Semiconductors are, as Belgian MEP Wouter Beke noted in a LinkedIn post on June 3, 2026, “today as strategic as energy or raw materials” [4]. The Chips Act 2.0 — the successor to the original Chips Act adopted in 2023, which was itself a reactive response to supply chain disruptions exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic — takes a broader, more geopolitically grounded approach [7]. Where the first Chips Act was largely an industrial response, the second departs from a wider geopolitical reality: Europe must become technologically more resilient in an increasingly unstable world [4]. The new Chips Act organises its ambitions around three major priorities: investing in research and innovation, including support for pilot lines, start-ups, and scale-ups; strengthening European supply and demand through strategic projects, public procurement, and faster permitting; and better preparing Europe for future shortages and crises [4]. In July 2026, the European Commission is expected to launch a call for AI Gigafactories and begin a consultation process with member states, the European Investment Bank, and other stakeholders on financing these technological sovereignty ambitions [7].

How Semiconductors Work — and Why Europe’s Position Matters

To understand why the Chips Act 2.0 matters, it helps to understand what semiconductors are and how they are made. Semiconductors — most commonly silicon-based chips — are the foundational components of virtually every modern electronic device, from smartphones and laptops to medical equipment, industrial machinery, and the servers that power cloud computing and artificial intelligence [GPT]. Their manufacture is one of the most complex industrial processes in existence, requiring machines capable of etching circuit patterns onto silicon wafers at nanometre scale — widths far smaller than a human hair [GPT]. The most advanced of these machines use a technology called Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which employs extremely short wavelengths of light — around 13.5 nanometres — to print transistors at densities that would be physically impossible with conventional optical lithography methods [GPT]. There is precisely one company in the world that manufactures EUV lithography machines: ASML, headquartered in Eindhoven, the Netherlands [4][GPT]. This makes ASML not merely a European champion but a genuinely irreplaceable node in the global semiconductor supply chain. As Wouter Beke observed, Europe’s strongest card in the semiconductor race lies in precisely this kind of world-leading research and technology: “Think of the research of Imec or the technology of ASML. If we intelligently build on these strengths, we protect our economy and remain open to the world” [4]. Imec, the world-leading semiconductor research centre, is based in Leuven, Belgium [4][GPT]. Together, ASML and Imec represent the kind of European excellence the Chips Act 2.0 is explicitly designed to protect, deepen, and scale.

While the semiconductor focus dominates the industrial debate, the Tech Sovereignty Package is also driven by a pressing legal conflict that gives the broader initiative its urgency. The United States CLOUD Act, enacted in March 2018, directly clashes with Article 48 of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): it grants US authorities the right to request data from American cloud providers, even when that data is stored on servers physically located in Europe [5]. The Netherlands’ own National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has confirmed in a legal opinion that American parent companies of European subsidiaries fall under the CLOUD Act, and that US authorities may potentially access data through American citizens working for EU companies [5]. This concern was brought into sharp relief on June 10, 2025, when Anton Carniaux, legal director of Microsoft France, testified under oath before a French Senate investigative committee, confirming that Microsoft is legally obligated to hand over data in the event of a US court order — a position Microsoft also confirmed in writing to the Scottish police in relation to Microsoft 365 [5]. When asked directly whether he could guarantee data would not be shared with US authorities, Carniaux replied simply: “No, he could not guarantee that” [5]. For European governments, businesses, and research institutions handling sensitive data, this is not a theoretical concern — it is a structural legal vulnerability that the CADA framework is directly designed to address.

The Ground Is Already Shifting: From Paris to Kiel

Long before the June 3, 2026 package was unveiled, a number of European institutions had already begun moving. In December 2025, France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) banned its employees from using non-European consumer chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT — developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI — and Google’s Gemini, replacing them with Emmy, a generative AI tool developed by Paris-based Mistral AI, and terminated its contract with Zoom in favour of Visio, a platform built by France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs [2]. By the spring of 2026, the CNRS had replaced 34,000 Zoom licences with the European Visio platform for 120,000 researchers, while a migration from Windows to Linux was ordered — with France’s DINUM having already migrated 250 workstations by that point [5]. Under current French government plans, all ministries are expected to submit phase-out plans by autumn 2026, with 2.5 million civil servants targeted to have made the switch by the end of 2029 — a transition projected to save more than €20 million annually in licensing costs [5]. In Germany, the country’s largest research funder, the DFG, recommended in early 2026 that researchers prioritise open-source European products and launched a funding initiative to preserve endangered research data sets held in foreign repositories, starting with four projects involving US data sets [2]. The state government of Schleswig-Holstein and Kiel University are also actively working to transition away from commercial Microsoft tools toward open-source and digitally sovereign alternatives [2]. These moves are not isolated experiments — they represent the early execution of a continental strategy that the June 2026 package now formally codifies.

The Road Ahead: Ambition, Cost, and Resistance

The scale of what Europe is attempting should not be underestimated — nor should the obstacles. Building the independent data centre infrastructure Europe needs is estimated to cost around €200 billion, requiring substantial private investment [5]. The CADA proposes a four-tier sovereignty model for public contracts in sensitive sectors and aims to triple Europe’s data centre capacity within five to seven years — placing the target window between 2031 and 2033 — though the act must still be formally approved by the European Parliament and the Council of member states [5]. Meanwhile, research firm Forrester concluded at the end of 2025 that a full migration away from American hyperscalers by European companies was unrealistic within the short to medium term, citing high migration costs and the absence of equivalent European alternatives [5]. Industry voices have also pushed back: Germany’s digital industry association Bitkom calculated that 87% of German companies source digital technologies or services from the US or EU, illustrating the depth of current dependency [5]. The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) has characterised Article 18 of the CADA as introducing an unworkable standard, labelling it a “direct directive for discriminatory market fragmentation” and a “dangerous recipe for progressive market protectionism” [5]. The European Parliament, however, has already signalled its direction of travel: on January 22, 2026, it passed a cross-party resolution with 471 votes in favour, 68 against, and 71 abstentions, calling for reduced dependency on American technology — a vote that cleared the political path for the CADA regulatory framework [5]. The combined capital expenditure forecasts for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta for all of 2026 together exceed $600 billion [5], underscoring just how formidable the competition Europe is attempting to reduce its dependency on truly is. What the Tech Sovereignty Package represents, then, is not a declaration of technological isolation, but — as MEP Wouter Beke put it — a determination to “become indispensable in crucial parts of the value chain” [4]. For the Netherlands, home to ASML and a dense ecosystem of deep-tech innovation, the stakes of getting that balance right could hardly be higher.

Bronnen

digital autonomy tech sovereignty