A short while ago, the Financial Times reported how Russia remains painfully dependent on foreign technology. After the invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin launched an ambitious six-year plan to completely transform the Russian economy, without reliance on the West. But the ambition to become “technologically sovereign” by 2030, experts say, sounds above all like hopeless wishful thinking.
Unfortunately, the story is a familiar one.
In France, the government has decided that 2.5 million civil servants have to stop using Zoom, Teams and other American video platforms by 2027. The motivation is security, confidentiality and “digital sovereignty”. Henna Virkkunen, European Commissioner for Technological Sovereignty, would agree, since she firmly believes that technological dependency can be used as a weapon.
Under the banner of EuroStack, the idea is increasingly resurfacing that Europe should be able to build its own digital value chain — from connectivity and cloud to AI and platforms — in order to be less dependent on critical infrastructure from other continents in times of geopolitical tension. It sounds logical. Inevitable, even.
The only question is: is it realistic?
Extreme capitalism
During my many company visits in Silicon Valley, I often hear the same “European questions”. They always start in the same way: “Yes, but…”. “We want to move forward. We see the urgency. But… privacy. But… regulation. But… feasibility.”
That “but” is not always unreasonable. The problem is that it has become our default operating system and it slows us down.
While Europe is busy writing plans, the American big tech companies are shifting into overdrive. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is increasing its investments for 2026 to 175 billion dollars. Amazon is going even further, with 200 billion dollars in investments. That is 4 billion dollars per week, all year long, to build AI infrastructure. Europe is being outpaced, in what can only be described as extreme capitalism.
Last year, the Dutch government asked Peter Wennink, ex-CEO of ASML, the only global European player in the entire AI story, to write a kind of state of the union on technology, innovation and investment. His diagnosis was harsh: the Netherlands is “fat, dumb and naively happy”.
The Draghi report was a warning. Europe is losing ground because of slow decision-making and insufficient investment power. More than a year later, we are still moving far too little. But Wennink goes even further. His core point is that we tried to eliminate risks through regulation, and in doing so we regulated away our room to act. Despite its technical talent, the Netherlands is weak because of slow decision-making, increasing regulatory pressure and declining collective impact, his conclusion states.
The Wennink report does not read merely as a diagnosis of the Netherlands. What is going wrong there is happening in an even more pronounced way at the European level. Whoever builds a society that is allergic to failure also builds a society that is allergic to innovation. That is why EuroStack is not so much technically difficult, but above all culturally difficult.
Moral mistake
We live in a time in which the cost of doing — both financially and in terms of time — is rapidly approaching zero, while the cost of waiting is increasing exponentially. Every day of delay increases the loss of opportunities, deepens dependencies and undermines competitiveness, trust and prosperity.
Google and Amazon invest as if time were infinitely expensive. Europe invests as if money were infinitely scarce. The best innovators excel at portfolio thinking: ten bets, seven failures, two mediocre outcomes and one champion. Silicon Valley sees failure as data. Europe still sees it as a moral mistake.
This is the time to act. And we will definitely have to do more than confidently shout “for sure” while wearing a cool pair of sunglasses.
Peter Hinssen was our keynote speaker at the Chief Digital Officer Awards 2024. He wrote several inspiring books. Check his latest ‘The Uncertainty Principle’ to learn more about thriving in uncertain times.
