Reclaiming the stack: Europe’s bid for digital sovereignty

The entanglement of tech and politics has become impossible to ignore — especially in the United States, where the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington are rapidly dissolving.

At President Trump’s inauguration, the CEOs of Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet took prominent seats — even ahead of cabinet nominees — an unmistakable sign of how closely US tech giants are now intertwined with national policy agendas. Just days earlier, outgoing President Biden had warned of a rising “tech industrial complex.”

This isn’t just symbolism. It reflects a broader shift: US tech firms are aligning themselves with a domestic industrial strategy that treats cloud, AI, and digital infrastructure as tools of geopolitical power. For Europe, the implications are becoming harder to ignore.

France’s AI and digital minister has since warned of digital “predators” undermining European autonomy. In Germany, government agencies have started phasing out Microsoft Teams in favour of domestic collaboration tools. And in Denmark, a nationwide migration to open-source Linux systems is underway.

These are not isolated incidents. They signal the early stages of a digital sovereignty movement — one driven as much by pragmatism as by politics. For Europe, reclaiming control over digital infrastructure is no longer a fringe idea. It’s a strategic imperative.

A critical dependency

Europe’s dependency on foreign hyperscalers is deep and longstanding. The majority of government services, healthcare systems, and private sector infrastructure run on platforms controlled by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google. This reliance has become so entrenched that it has long gone unnoticed — until now.

Consider the US CLOUD Act, which gives American authorities the right to access data stored on US-owned servers, even if that data resides in Europe. For EU citizens and enterprises, this creates a fundamental contradiction: their data is simultaneously subject to local privacy laws like the GDPR, and to foreign surveillance laws they cannot influence.

Vendor lock-in compounds the problem. Many organisations find themselves tied to proprietary ecosystems with limited portability, unable to move or replicate workloads across providers without significant cost or risk. Worse still, operational decisions, such as product changes, pricing, or data handling practices, are increasingly made without European input.

Cloud infrastructure has become critical infrastructure. The question is no longer whether it matters who controls it, but what happens when those controls sit thousands of miles away, in different jurisdictions with different interests.

Europe’s tech awakening

European governments are beginning to act. France has launched substantial investments in domestic cloud initiatives, supporting providers like OVHcloud and investing in sovereign platforms that have “SecNumCloud” certification. Germany, meanwhile, has taken steps to reduce its reliance on non-European providers across federal agencies. In the case of Denmark, the shift to Linux isn’t just about cost-saving. It’s about control, transparency, and security — hardly surprising considering Trump’s “interest” in Greenland. 

These moves are not reactive or symbolic. They are part of a broader shift toward digital self-determination — one that recognises sovereignty as a foundation for resilience. For too long, Europe’s digital future has been outsourced. Now, there is a growing realisation that true independence requires owning the stack — from infrastructure and identity to data and application logic.

Resilience over nationalism

This movement is not about anti-American sentiment. Nor is it an argument for economic protectionism. European digital sovereignty is not a rejection of global collaboration — it’s a recalibration of risk.

Governments and enterprises alike are waking up to the reality that resilience cannot be achieved through over-reliance on a narrow set of providers. When infrastructure is dominated by a handful of foreign vendors, the system becomes brittle, not strong.

Europe should move towards a more robust approach defined by:

• Local hosting with clear jurisdictional control.
• Open standards that prevent vendor lock-in.
• Open-source platforms that offer transparency and adaptability.
• Diverse provider ecosystems that encourage innovation and flexibility.

For identity and access management in particular, open protocols like OAuth and OpenID Connect enable multi-cloud orchestration. This means that if an organisation needs to switch providers or host in a new region, their identity layer can remain consistent and secure — a crucial capability in an era of geopolitical turbulence and accelerating cyber threats.

A pragmatic path to digital sovereignty

The path to digital sovereignty does not require a revolution. But it does demand focus and follow-through.

A practical approach begins with auditing existing digital dependencies — not just at the infrastructure level, but across the full digital stack. From there, organisations should identify where resilience and portability are weakest, and where they are most exposed to external decisions beyond their control.

This assessment should inform a phased diversification strategy. That might mean gradually shifting workloads to sovereign clouds, adopting open-source alternatives to proprietary software, or decoupling key components — such as authentication or API management — from single-vendor ecosystems.

Governments have a role to play, not only in policy and procurement, but in investing in skills and local innovation ecosystems. Sovereignty is not a checklist item — it is a capability that requires sustained support to build and maintain.

Choosing the future

In a world where digital systems underpin every aspect of life, from education and healthcare to finance and national defence, infrastructure control is no longer a technical issue. It is a matter of strategic independence.

Europe has a choice to make. Continue relying on foreign platforms for its most sensitive digital functions, or invest in a future it can truly own.

Sovereignty is not about isolation. It’s about agency — the power to shape a digital future that reflects European values, laws, and long-term interests.