Europe is the world's third-largest economic power, the planet's largest single market, the cradle of the scientific revolution — and yet, by 2026, it boasts none of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers, none of the top five artificial intelligence companies, and none of the top three cloud providers. This observation, repeated for a decade, has only led to ambitious investment plans in press releases and modest ones in execution.
The European Chips Act, adopted in 2023 with a budget of 43 billion euros, was meant to reposition Europe in the semiconductor race. Two years later, Europe's share of global chip production has gone from 9% to... 8.5%. The Intel plant in Magdeburg, the centerpiece of the plan, has seen its schedule pushed back by two years. TSMC is still hesitating to set up in Dresden under the proposed conditions. Meanwhile, the United States has injected $280 billion through the CHIPS and Science Act, and China is investing over $150 billion in its national ecosystem.
In artificial intelligence, the gap is even more striking. The foundational models — GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Claude 4 — are all American. Mistral AI, the French champion, is a David facing Goliaths whose research budgets exceed the GDP of some member states. The European AI Act, which came into force in 2025, has certainly established a pioneering regulatory framework, but it has also created a competitive asymmetry: European companies are subject to constraints that their American and Chinese competitors ignore.
European sovereign cloud remains a mirage. Gaia-X, the Franco-German consortium launched with great fanfare in 2020, has produced no operational infrastructure capable of competing with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The data of European companies and citizens continue to be hosted, processed, and monetized by actors subject to the American Cloud Act and Washington's extraterritorial laws.
Europe has the talent, the universities, the capital, and the values to build credible technological sovereignty. What it lacks is the political will to turn its ambitions into actions — to choose massive investment over defensive regulation, industrial integration over national fragmentation, speed of execution over institutional perfectionism. The time for white papers is over. Europe must act — or definitively accept its status as a consumer of technologies invented elsewhere.
