Digitalisation has invaded our lives at all levels. There is no corner, personal or professional, that does not include a digital fact. However, most of the technologies we use in our daily lives come from outside European borders, mainly from the United States, such as Google, WhatsApp, Amazon or Microsoft, followed by a long list of others. In fact, technologically speaking, Europe has become a ‘colony of the United States’, according to former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta in La Vanguardia. In Letta’s opinion, the fact of being a colony means that ‘we don’t decide anything on many key issues’. Faced with this reality, various groups and personalities have already begun to suggest that perhaps Europeans should seek and generate technological alternatives so as not to depend on third parties and to make our own, competent technology our own.

Now, the question is clear: are we willing to turn our technological ecosystem inside out —as if it were a sock—? This almost existential doubt has become even more acute with the rise of global geopolitical tensions, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House. Without going any further, visits to the European Alternatives website have multiplied exponentially since Trump’s inauguration in January of this year. This demonstrates the unease and the beginning of a paradigm shift in Europe that unleashes it, if only a little, from the US. We are witnessing the awakening of the old West, which is beginning to look askance at what its greatest partner of the last century is doing. Such pro-European initiatives have never been a widespread school of thought —we all know that Europe is a plural and complex territory— but in recent years they have gained considerable momentum as almost complete technological dependence on the American and Chinese giants has become increasingly possible.

This desire to untie itself from the big American tech companies is by no means unfounded. The reason? The Trump administration has already begun to dismantle the EU-US data protection framework (DPF), the mechanism enacted by Joe Biden that formed the legal basis for the DPF and imposed safeguards limiting US intelligence agencies’ access to European data. This aggressive move by Trump towards Europe leaves European organisations working with cloud providers on the other side of the Atlantic in a legal vacuum, because the fundamental basis for considering the US a suitable destination for EU personal data has vanished and looking for alternatives could become a necessity. Especially if European companies seek to protect their data and prevent a third party -Alphabet, Meta or Amazon- from unilaterally selling or giving it away.

At a time when the discourse of fear is growing, it is good to remember that sovereignty goes beyond defence capabilities, and that technology plays and will play a key role in the socio-economic development of our society. Continuing to be tied to foreign technological solutions that condition where certain information is and how it is accessed means that societies in the Old Continent continue to have limited technological autonomy. Moreover, they are also conditioned by the management of legislative changes by their technology providers.

On the other hand, Europe needs to focus its efforts on building real and viable layers of technological sovereignty and not settle for being the world’s ‘regulatory gatekeeper’. All these years, Europe has devoted itself to regulating and regulating what others do, reaching limits that have short-circuited Europe’s own capacity for technological innovation. Europe cannot just be the most regulated market in the world and, along these lines, the European chip project stands out, as well as the different artificial intelligence and quantum industry factories that are beginning to awaken in this same ecosystem. Without going any further, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is a world benchmark and has been chosen to host one of the first seven AI factories to be set up in the EU. The European Commission also commissioned the BSC to lead the scientific development of future European chips, suitable for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, automotive and the Internet of Things, among many other applications.

In short, this race is about building fully European technology stacks, computing engines and processing factories. And for what purpose? To move towards a differential European sovereignty, with concrete solutions that respond to the real needs of the economy and society and allow Europe to enter the technological race of the 21st century.