Europe is waking up to the uncomfortable reality that its digital infrastructure, from cloud storage and semiconductors to social media, is overwhelmingly built, owned, and controlled by US corporations, according to Foreign Policy.

With Donald Trump back in the White House and openly weaponising economic interdependencies to extract political concessions, EU officials are now racing to reduce that vulnerability. The effort goes by a new name in Brussels: tech sovereignty.

US firms, primarily Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, currently fulfil more than two-thirds of Europe's cloud computing needs, and over 80% of Europe's digital products are sourced from outside the EU.

The continent's most advanced semiconductor chips come largely from US companies like Nvidia, and its dominant social media platforms, like X, Instagram, and Facebook, are all US-owned.

That dependency has become a strategic liability, Foreign Policy says. Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to exploit trade and defense ties as leverage, and EU officials no longer consider it farfetched that digital services could be next. "We need tech sovereignty to take our destiny in our own hands," Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the European Commission, told Foreign Policy.

Three tracks in pursuit of tech sovereignty

In an article for Foreign Policy, Anchal Vohra outlines three distinct strands to Europe's decoupling effort.

The first is the creation of viable European social media alternatives, platforms free of manipulative algorithms and bot networks, where "debate can be held freely." The second is semiconductor independence, anchored by the EU Chips Act, which has mobilized over €100 billion to rebuild domestic chip manufacturing capacity. The third, and perhaps most operationally critical, is the development of sovereign cloud infrastructure to reduce reliance on US-based data storage and computing services.

On the artificial intelligence front, the EU has launched its InvestAI initiative, targeting €200 billion in investment to develop homegrown AI capabilities and reduce dependence on US models.

A full self-sufficiency scenario, however, would come at a staggering price of an estimated €3.6 trillion over 10 years, according to the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). A more targeted strategic partnership approach, maintaining some US ties while building key domestic capacities, is estimated at around €300 billion.

The DSA: Brussels' digital sword (and shield)

Central to Europe's digital governance ambitions is the Digital Services Act (DSA), a sweeping regulatory framework governing how social media platforms operate in the EU.

Its most high-profile target has been X, owned by Elon Musk, who has publicly called for the abolition of the EU and has amplified far-right European voices on his platform. The EU has launched multiple DSA investigations into X over issues ranging from deceptive verification practices to algorithmic manipulation, culminating in a €120 million fine last December.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the fine an attack not just on X but on "all American tech platforms and the American people." While US Vice President JD Vance threatened to pull troops from NATO if the EU enforced its digital laws, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wielded tariff threats over European steel.

In January 2026, a fresh DSA investigation was opened after X's AI chatbot Grok was used to generate non-consensual explicit images of women and children. "Child sex abuse, including digital undressing of women without their consent, is not a premium privilege," Regnier told Foreign Policy, after X restricted the feature to paying subscribers rather than removing it outright.

Searching for a European public square

Europe's search for a domestic social media alternative has so far produced mixed results.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, a new platform called W was unveiled, pitched by CEO Anna Zeiter as "a global platform made in Europe, owned by Europeans," with passport-based verification to root out bots and no backdoor access for US law enforcement. Zeiter was clear that funding is entirely private, dismissing reports of EU institutional backing.

Meanwhile, Mastodon, the open-source platform built by German developer Eugen Rochko, has existed for years but remains a niche alternative, crowdfunded, data-light, and largely seen as an echo chamber.

Accordingly, 51 EU legislators signed a letter in January urging the European Commission to back European social media innovation, warning that "now is the moment to back European alternatives to the dominant social media platforms."

A shield for whose democracy?

The EU's framing of its digital governance push as a defense of democratic values sits uneasily alongside a documented pattern of suppression of pro-Palestinian speech, both on platforms operating under EU jurisdiction and within EU member states themselves.

In October 2023, then-EU Commissioner Thierry Breton sent letters to major platforms, including Meta, Google/YouTube, and X, warning them to police "illegal content" in the context of "Israel's" war on Gaza.

Civil society organisations and digital rights groups argued that the letters created pressure for over-moderation of Palestinian speech, with the DSA's broad definitions enabling the most restrictive interpretations to cascade across the entire EU. Access Now and other groups have since called for the DSA to explicitly safeguard Palestinian digital rights.

European digital strategic autonomy

European officials are careful to frame their ambitions in moderate terms. Regnier insists the EU is not seeking to decouple from the United States, but to remain "strategically autonomous."

Google's chief legal officer, Kent Walker, has argued that an "open digital sovereignty" model, where US companies partner with European counterparts for local storage and compliance, would serve Europe better than erecting new digital walls.

Member-state divisions, a chronic talent drain, enforcement gaps, and the sheer cost of building from scratch all complicate Europe's ambitions to achieve digital sovereignty, but the direction of travel is clear. There is a quiet consensus in Brussels that no tech company, US or otherwise, should have what one analyst described as a de facto kill switch over Europe's digital life.

Source:Websites