Europe’s Misguided Plans for Pursuing Digital Independence

After years of living in denial, the European Union has seemingly finally noticed that it lacks something the U.S. has: a vibrant tech sector. Europe’s lack of a tech industry has increasingly left it dependent on America and Silicon Valley. Two new initiatives aim to mitigate this issue and take Europe toward “digital independence.” Sadly, they are both misguided.

The first is EuroStack, an initiative that originated from a multiparty conference at the European Parliament in September 2024. Out of this came a policy report envisioning a way to break European dependency across raw materials and chips, networks, cloud, software, data, and AI through €300 billion of investment across ten years.