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Tech sovereignty | Deloitte Insights As the global geopolitical environment becomes increasingly complex and uncertain, businesses and policymakers are urging their countries and regions to take greater control of their digital infrastructure, especially components related to artificial intelligence. Gartner® estimates that “by 2028, 65% of governments worldwide will introduce some technological sovereignty requirements to improve independence and protect against extraterritorial regulatory interference.”1 Technology sovereignty is based on the ability of countries and regional blocs to independently develop, control, regulate, and fund digital technologies such as cloud, quantum computing, AI, semiconductors, and digital communication infrastructure.2It can include specific geographic, legal, and regulatory requirements around flows of data and where physical facilities are, who owns them, who governs them, who operates them, and who provides the hardware, software, and services that power them. The desire for sovereignty is not new, but the shift toward technology sovereignty will likely quicken in 2026. Over the next decade, significant investment will flow into cloud computi…

US-China tech empires in a race to cement supremacy The US-UK technology deal announced in September 2025 promises to accelerate Britain’s AI sector, but critics warn it will happen at the expense of national tech sovereignty. It reflects the steady trend of US government and private interests extending a technologically driven form of hegemony, employing communications, data and AI systems to deepen dependence on American networks and weaponize against rivals. China has built a parallel structure of influence through its own technology exports, manufacturing base and integrated supply chains, challenging the American model without the costly global military footprint. And unlike earlier empires, Washington’s and Beijing’s systems increasingly overlap: Spain, long considered a reliable partner for American tech firms and data security , has faced US pressure after contracting with Chinese company Huawei in July to store judicial wiretap data. Yet both tech-driven networks face a growing diffusion of capability. Advances in manufacturing, resource mapping, and digital development are making it easier for smaller states to build industries that have until now been dominated by major…

US Tech Giants and Far-Right Alliances Challenge European Democracy ... The New Geopolitical Chessboard: Technology, Ideology, and the Future of Transatlantic Power The tectonic plates of global power are shifting beneath our feet, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the intricate dance between technology, politics, and ideology that now defines the Western world. As the United States pivots toward a more insular, authoritarian-tinged posture—fueled by a coalition of radical libertarian technocrats and emboldened political actors—the European Union finds itself caught in a precarious double bind. For business and technology leaders, this is not merely an abstract concern; it is a live wire that threatens to reshape markets, regulatory landscapes, and the very architecture of international alliances. Silicon Valley’s Ideological Realignment: From Innovation to Intervention Once the standard-bearers of liberal optimism and open markets, America’s technology giants now stand accused of complicity in a broader ideological shift. The convergence between Washington’s strategic priorities and the ambitions of Silicon Valley’s elite has produced a formidable axis—one that leverages …

EU tech sovereignty may be ‘illusion’ as China, US dominate AI: Chinese expert The EU’s concept of tech sovereignty may prove an “illusion” in a world where artificial intelligence is dominated by China and the US, a Chinese expert has argued, urging Beijing to seize the opportunity provided by Trump to render its products “indispensable” to middle powers. In a bid to help the bloc become “a global leader” in artificial intelligence and protect its “digital independence”, the European Union rolled out its Technological Sovereignty Package last week. The EU defined tech...

Europe tech sovereignty is bigger than search defaults - Proton Two recent decisions from the EU this week illustrate the state of digital sovereignty in Europe. Facing existential threats from the US and a crippling reliance on foreign tech providers , the European Commission announced an ambitious legislative package on tech sovereignty (new window) . The commission wants the EU to compete alongside the US and China on chips, data centers, and AI, building local resilience and infusing the latest IT revolution with European values like data protection. The plan is expected to mobilize hundreds of billions of euros (new window) for local industry. The next day, European Parliament took its own step. They updated the default search engine (new window) on their browsers, from Google to Qwant (new window) , a privacy-first provider in France. The gap between the European government’s bold ambitions, through a serious legislative intervention, and its own baby-step implementation within one of its branches shows how difficult this kind of transition can be. They will have to migrate massive amounts of data and retool thousands of employees and departments. And they will need to encou…

AI Sovereignty Is an Illusion. Resilience Is Real | BCG BCG Henderson Institute: Discover new thinking shaping the business landscapeYou are subscribed to BCG's BCG Henderson Institute newsletter.Manage Subscriptions In recent years, many governments have pursued AI sovereignty by focusing on specific layers of the technology stack. But various initiatives have demonstrated the challenges of this strategy: consider Australia’s private sector push to create a “national” large language model (LLM), Germany’s incentives to expand chip production, and India’s efforts to assemble a national GPU cluster, among others. As our previous research has shown, the resource intensity and rapid pace of AI development means that only aselect few superpowers and middle powershave the scale and breadth of capabilities to sustain a sovereignty strategy over time. Yet, even for most of these countries, AI sovereignty conceived as full-stack autarky remains an illusion. Even if stack-based sovereignty were attainable, it could prove risky: the strategy implicitly relies on the assumption that today’s compute-intensive, LLM-based AI paradigm will continue to dominate. Yet, future advances in AI archi…

Quo Vadis, Imperium? EU technological sovereignty as the ... Helder Matos (master’s student in Human Rights at the School of Law of the University of Minho) Introduction In March 2024, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) revealed that the European Commission, the institution assuming the role of global vanguard in the matter of digital rights, violated the EU’s own data protection regulation due to its structural dependency on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. [1] Although the EDPS closed the case in July 2025 after the Commission updated its licensing agreements with Microsoft, this episode brings to the surface the underlying problem that this article proposes to address. [2] Even as it received the green light to proceed with business-as-usual, the European Commission admitted its deep concerns regarding the crippling dependence on a non-European company for the digital platforms needed for normal day-to-day functioning. [3] The European Union (EU) does not control the technological infrastructure it runs on, as it is forced to negotiate the terms of its own data security with foreign corporations. Furthermore, during April 2026, the announcement of Anthropic’s Claude Myt…

Can Europe build its own AI heavyweights to rival the US? With AI dominated by US firms, Europe is pushing for more independence. New partnerships, investments and startups aim to boost the continent's digital sovereignty, but challenges around funding and regulation remain.

The Illusion of AI Sovereignty: Mapping the Five-Layer AI Stack The discourse surrounding "AI sovereignty" has become a central pillar of geopolitical strategy. From Brussels to Washington and Beijing, leaders speak of autonomy as a prerequisite for national security. However, as discussed in the second episode of theState of the Globepodcast miniseries, the idea of total AI independence is largely an illusion. We are not witnessing a race toward self-sufficiency, but rather a deepening of interdependent vulnerabilities. To understand who is winning or losing, we must look beyond the models themselves and examine what Jensen Huang, the Founder and CEO of NVIDIA,callsthe "five-layer cake" of AI: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. ‍ In the early innings of the AI revolution, the focus was almost exclusively on chips, specifically those designed by NVIDIA. However, the bottleneckhas shifted. The primary constraint is no longer just the chips, but the energy required to power them. Europe finds itself in a particularly precarious position: we occupy the region with thehighest energy pricesglobally, yet we are trying to compete in a field that is fundamentally p…

EU ‘tech sovereignty’: Uncoupling from the US and China? The EU is trying to assert its strategic independence in an unstable world – a world of bullies, as some members of the EU Parliament describe it. That means independence in matters of defence and energy supplies, but also in the whole field of tech. The European Commission says non-EU companies provide more than 80 percent of the EU’s digital products and services. One of the key proposals aimed at changing that is the “Tech Sovereignty Package”, which was presented in early June. With our guests, we dive into the initiative, explain the geopolitical context and ask what it would take for the bloc to achieve real technological sovereignty.

The Illusion of AI Sovereignty: Washington and Beijing Still Pull the ... In an era where digital data has become the new oil and AI the refinery, governments across the globe are waking up to a critical question: Who controls the intelligence that shapes their citizens’ future? As of 2024, 137 countries have enacted data protection laws, according to the Cloud Security Alliance. This signals rising concerns around digital sovereignty, national security, and citizen privacy in an increasingly globalized world. But what began as a regulatory response to safeguard sensitive data is now evolving into a broader and more ambitious mandate: the pursuit of sovereign AI. Across the globe, governments are no longer content with being passive consumers of foreign-built AI systems. They are investing heavily to build their own AI infrastructure, foundational models, and regulatory frameworks that align with their cultural norms, linguistic diversity, national priorities, and geopolitical values. Why? Because a sovereign state cannot afford to build its intelligence on AI models that are blind to local realities. Will an algorithm built in and for Boston respect the data-sharing taboos of Be…

Digital Sovereignty and the Political Economy of Technology: A Comparative Study of U.S. and China Perspectives | OxJournal Digital Sovereignty and the Political Economy of Technology: A Comparative Study of U.S. and China Perspectives Posted by Aya Ali Kaj, Konstantina-Anna Apostolopoulou, Alya Moumena, Esther Opeyemi-Olatunji and Beren Tekin | Sep 17, 2025 | Politics | 0 Introduction Digital technology is having a great impact in the continued evolution of a digital economy around the world. The growth of digital technologies is resulting in the digitalisation of processes and systems by governments to provide efficient and fast delivery of services to citizens and people around the world (Hulko et al., 2025). As digital infrastructures become increasingly embedded across sectors of the economy, they are no longer merely tools but rather socio-technical systems that shape practices and innovation (Tilson, Lyytinen & Sørensen, 2010; Star and Ruhleder, 1996). They are integral to the way companies, governments and societies function and access information, underpinning platforms and institutions alike (Plantin et al., 2018; Edwards et al., 2009). This transformation alludes to the…