One doesn’t often hear senior officials from the European Union, with its centralized governance of 27 member countries, talk about sovereignty. But that was very much at the heart of the agenda during Roberto Viola’s visit to Washington last week.
Viola, the European Commission’s longtime chief tech regulator, met with U.S. officials to try to manage a persistently tense relationship between Europe and the United States under U.S. President Donald Trump. As part of this effort, Viola signed the EU on to the Trump administration’s Pax Silica initiative, which is aimed at securing technological supply chains.
But he also sought to lay out the European Union’s new “tech sovereignty” agenda. That push is anchored in a package, released on June 3, that calls for the bloc to strengthen its “competitiveness, strategic autonomy and geoeconomic position” in artificial intelligence by developing more of its own capacity in semiconductor manufacturing, cloud computing, and AI model development, with a view to “protecting Europe’s digital independence.”
Viola insists that Europe’s sovereignty push is not an effort to wean itself off dependence on U.S. technology. “I think it’s well understood that tech sovereignty doesn’t mean tech isolation,” he told an audience at the Atlantic Council. “Tech sovereignty means … being proactive when it comes to innovation and being sure that you understand who are your friends and allies and where the danger lies.”
But behind closed doors, European officials have been grappling with an increasing uncertainty about which side of that equation the United States currently sits on. U.S. tech firms such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta have long bristled at European tech regulations that they say are too restrictive, and technology has become a lightning rod in the Trump administration’s rapidly deteriorating relationship with the other side of the Atlantic. U.S. officials, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have repeatedly slammed European tech regulations, accusing the EU of using those regulations to censor free speech.
In the past two weeks alone, Trump threatened a new 100 percent tariff on any European countries that impose digital service taxes on U.S. companies and abruptly cut off all non-U.S. citizens—including those from allied countries—from using AI company Anthropic’s latest large language models.
“There is a very strong feeling that Europe has become too dependent” on U.S. technology, said one EU official, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. While some individual member states have long held those views, they now feature across the board at the bloc’s highest political levels. “That’s a direct result of the Trump administration,” the official added. “You can spin it in different ways, but it is because of the changes that we’ve seen in the 18 months of the Trump administration.”
The trans-Atlantic challenge that Europe now faces on technology is the same as the one that it faces in defense: It has been addicted to U.S. supply for so long that it cannot quit cold turkey, and its homegrown competitors in many advanced technologies remain significantly behind U.S. alternatives.
Mistral, the French AI company that is seen as Europe’s top tech champion, has an estimated market value of about $23 billion, compared to the $852 billion and $965 billion, respectively, of its U.S. rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. European companies account for less than 15 percent of the continent’s cloud computing market, with the rest captured largely by U.S. companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
“There’s no European company that can compete with Microsoft or Amazon,” said Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis. That reality, along with a “profound loss of trust” in the United States under Trump, has led to what Polyakova describes as a “deeply problematic” dynamic.
“The U.S. is being put in the same threat bucket by Europeans as China when it comes to technology dependencies,” she said. “That is leading to this very difficult moment with the combination of emotions, leading to loss of trust, leading to resentment against the fact that there is a dependency on U.S. tech companies in Europe, that’s really leading to this tension that we’re seeing now.”
Europe does still have its strengths in more unsung areas of technology. Dutch company ASML dominates the global manufacturing of the ultraviolet lithography machines that are critical to the semiconductor manufacturing process, while much of Western 5G telecommunications infrastructure relies on systems from European firms such as Ericsson, Siemens, and Nokia.
“Before you start thinking about how you reduce your dependencies on large U.S. companies, maybe you should be thinking about where you have a competitive advantage that you should double down on, because I think the ship has sailed in all these other areas,” Polyakova said.
Viola said there is room for collaboration with the United States even as Europe pursues sovereignty. “It’s not schizophrenic—it is perfectly normal to say there could be an ambition of owning the agenda of sovereignty and at the same time a very strong cooperation agenda,” he said. “The problem comes when things become acute in terms of a particular dependency, because then things normally tend to go a bit wrong,” he added.
The trust deficit created by the Trump administration’s willingness to weaponize those dependencies may be difficult for Europe to overcome.
“It’s the whole constellation of issues; it isn’t just in tech,” the EU official said. “It’s in the trade area with the tariffs, it’s in the security area with the removal of troops … in general, the kind of unpredictability and capriciousness of the Trump administration is of concern to European decision-makers.”
While Washington has largely welcomed Europe’s efforts to take on more of its own defense and security, it hasn’t had quite the same reaction to its self-sufficiency push on the tech front. The Trump administration has made the export of the “American tech stack”—a bundle of integrated U.S.-made technologies that help power applications—a key policy goal in an effort to counter the spread of similar technologies offered by China.
The same week that Viola was in Washington, Jacob Helberg—the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment—published a piece on the State Department’s Substack blog titled “The Digital Sovereignty Trap.” In it, he argued that the push for creating national AI champions and indigenous capabilities is “backward and counterproductive” when superior U.S. versions of those capabilities already exist.
“They will have achieved not so-called ‘digital sovereignty’ but a kind of synchronized mediocrity—a planet of subscale clones, each heroically reconstructing last year’s breakthrough while the breakthrough itself moves on without them,” he wrote. “While others rebuild the present, American firms will be inventing the future.”
Helberg’s piece did not specifically mention Europe, focusing instead on similar efforts at the United Nations. But the timing and the messaging will have raised eyebrows in Brussels nonetheless. And Helberg did mention some of those leading European companies while expanding on his argument further during a gathering in Washington on Monday evening.
“In the U.S., we missed the boat on 5G years ago, and our response was not: ‘Gee, let’s recreate entirely an American 5G company,’” he said. “We used Ericsson, and our companies focused on other verticals.”
Viola said he spoke to Helberg about the piece when they met. “I told him that in a way I agree, and I don’t feel that it referred to Europe,” he said. “We try not to fall into the trap of everything being made in Europe to the point of being ridiculous, and I hope the U.S. also doesn’t fall in the same trap.” But he added that on issues such as the protection of European data, for example, “I think we say something which is almost a no-brainer, and I think we have the right to protect our sovereignty in this respect.”
The EU official whom Foreign Policy spoke to also weighed in on Helberg’s piece. They agreed that “manufacturing or copying inferior or yesterday’s technologies” is not the goal of the digital sovereignty push. But, they continued, “The critical element which is missing in Helberg’s piece is dependency and trust—a country using its technological advance as a weapon (e.g. by denying or switching off access). This is what is spurring countries to diversify, build their own capabilities, and reduce vulnerabilities.”
The official illustrated the point further by coming back to the likes of ASML and Ericsson: “We have a number of quite important companies in this chain—does anybody in the U.S. or around the world believe that the EU will turn off that switch? It’s [the Trump administration’s] willingness to use their power that bothers us.”
