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I'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting:
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# Capacity
* at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years;
* simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres;
* improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing;
ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensive applications.
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Given the prevalence of 'degrowth' ideas here in the EU and the severe NIMBY problem (even with stuff as basic as housing let alone data centres), I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to be able to pull this off.
Where is the investment coming from (the capital markets union/savings and investment union isn't there so far)? How to make building infrastructure faster? Could some other regulation be removed to aid AI and tech use?
Not convinced adding regulation alone will solve things in European tech.
I look forward to the day we have a sovereign CPU, RAM, storage, ancillary ICs, production line, supply chain, software stack and associated infra than I can walk into a shop and buy and use myself.
I don't think it'll ever happen though. These initiatives are mostly fluff. Throw everything into AI because it's the current fad but not even look at stuff that runs everything RIGHT NOW.
If anything was to happen war-wise, we'll be running everything on recycled trash.
>If anything was to happen war-wise, we'll be running everything on recycled trash.
ESMC should be online in a few years with 16nm class ICs. That will be tech that's over a decade old at that point but it's also "good enough" for anything except AI training.
The "good enough for everything except AI training" cutoff is roughly right, though inference at scale also runs more efficiently on newer nodes — it's not a clean binary. For government, telecom, embedded, and most HPC workloads, 16nm is genuinely sufficient. The real question is whether European fabs can sustain yield and volume economics, which historically has been harder than the lithography milestone itself.
We have now sovereign CPUs but we are struggling to get HPC ones. They will be there soon though in 5-6 years. RAM is already possible for Europe to manufacture if they can get the fab. Supply chain remains a question mark for the raw materials. Software stack is almost there.
In effect, I would say we are around 60% there. The most important thing actually missing is Fabs. Everything else I see a straightforward path with money and time.
IIRC "sovereign CPU" usually means domestically designed, not just manufactured. So RISC-V cores like those from SiPearl technically qualify even without European fabs. The fab gap is real though, you're right that it's the main bottleneck.
No true Scostsman, aye me lad. Now really, because big bang doesn't work, means nothing else should be even tried? Are you even from the EU to actually know, or just feel bothered by the anti-US sentiment oozing from those initiatives? If that helps, my feeling is that it's not anti-US, just a normal reaction to the acts and thoughts of the beloved best-leader-ever ruling the US right now, and his faithful elite. It's trying to protect oneselves, maybe a bit of rallying under the (blue) flag, and defeatism has no place in it.
Worked on a small RISC-V firmware project that used some ESMC-adjacent supply chain components. The "fluff" criticism is fair for the software side, but the hardware story is genuinely moving. Sipearl's Rhea chip taped out and is running in Jupiter. It's not a shop-ready CPU, but dismissing all of it as fad-chasing misses that some real silicon exists now.
I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly.
Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out.
That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.
Not sure what to make of this. There is also IPCEI-CIS https://www.8ra.com/ipcei-cis/ but I can't see that in that strategy. Or it is buried somewhere deep.
Funny how they are publishing free advertising for X, fb, yt etc. on their website. This is telling more about the situation than any speaker at the conference will be able to do.
CNLL communiqué on the adopted EU Tech Sovereignty Package (3 June 2026)
On 3 June 2026, the European Commission adopted the Tech Sovereignty Package — Communication, Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) proposal, and EU Open Source Strategy. The CNLL confirms the essence of the historic shift it had welcomed in late May: open source is elevated to the rank of an instrument of European industrial policy. But the CNLL publicly regrets two significant setbacks introduced between the leaked draft and the adopted text:
- "Open source first" (CADA Article 41) — the title is ambitious, the body is weak. The verb is "encourage", word for word the verb used by France's Digital Republic Law since 2016, with broad derogations ("security, total cost, and any other duly justified objective criterion") and no documented or auditable assessment requirement. The phrase "open source first" appears only in the article's title, not in its body.
- "Public money, public code" (CADA Article 42) — reduced to a conditional cataloguing obligation: the article imposes nothing on the decision to release software, only on the mechanism when an entity discretionarily chooses to do so. The structural publication obligation that the European open source industry has defended for ten years is not in the CADA.
Two further lexical softenings in the Communication: "key lever" became "crucially contributes"; "sovereignty-washing" was removed. The draft promised to go beyond the limit France has known since 2016 — the adopted text reproduces it at European scale.
Confirmed acquis: the OSI definition is now anchored (incl. EUPL); APELL (the European Open Source Business Association) is named in the document; Open Source Maintenance Instrument with fork capability and security-mirroring programme are retained; envelope doubled from 1 to 2 B€ / 7 years (public + private); EuroStack cited in CADA IA study footnote.
The CADA is still a proposal. The CNLL calls for industry and MEP mobilisation over the next twelve months on four priorities: (1) transform Article 41 into an enforceable obligation in the trilogue, with documented/auditable assessment of derogations, in convergence with European OSS editors signatories of the 3 June open letter; (2) mobilise the existing national legal acquis (Article 16 Digital Republic, Article L. 123-4-1 Code de l'éducation, Italian Article 68, German IT-Planungsrat, Dutch frameworks), which becomes proportionally more important; (3) defend the licence-based legal definition of OSS; (4) neutralise the practice of sovereignty washing — push enforceable jurisdictional immunity criteria (no CLOUD Act / FISA exposure) at the highest CADA sovereignty levels.
OK, so a bunch of larger behind-the-times EU tech companies get a few billions over a few years. So what? If they were capable of executing before, they would have been competing already. Some bureaucrat is not going to conjure up desired qualities.
Europe started going backwards from some time. Energy is becoming more expensive, raw materials are becoming more expensive, industry is thickening, jobs are closed, education is not ok, most important tech developments are happening elsewhere, we don't have a thriving startup environment, most large tech companies are established elsewhere.
Maybe we will wake up at some point and do something.
Discourses won't put foot on the table and won't help with economic competition.
Poland is doing fine. Southern Europe is doing very well. Greece is growing superfast. Switzerland is still one the richest and successful countries in the world. Denmark is amazing.
Germany and the UK are the sick men of Europe. France is going brankrupt. Careful with confusing the 19th century superpowers with the whole of Europe. Yes cost of living has increased by which i mean real wages have stalled in many places, but this is worldwide and mostly due to external causes such as rocketing gas and oil prices. If we succeed in making lasting peace with Russia and getting access again to their natural resources, a new golden age may well commence.
I mean, yes - if your biggest external source of energy declares war, and your hitherto trusted defence partner goes rogue - it's going to have a chilling effect and the measures needed to address that will hit both the economy and the populous
Sovereign stack sounds great until you're the one on-call when the EU-certified hypervisor kernel panics at 3am and the vendor's support portal is in Polish.
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# Capacity
* at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years;
* simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres;
* improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing; ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensive applications.
---
Given the prevalence of 'degrowth' ideas here in the EU and the severe NIMBY problem (even with stuff as basic as housing let alone data centres), I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to be able to pull this off.