Europe's governments are spending billions to escape reliance on American tech giants, but a growing chorus of experts warns the strategy could leave them worse off: locked into expensive homegrown systems while missing the scale needed to compete globally. France is ordering all government agencies to ditch Windows and migrate off non-European platforms by fall, while the UK's Open Rights Group warns that decades of Big Tech dependence has become a national security crisis. Yet both nations face the same paradox: building truly sovereign AI and cloud infrastructure requires resources, talent, and scale that Europe's fragmented tech ecosystem may never achieve.

Why Is Europe Suddenly Obsessed with Digital Sovereignty?

The urgency is real, and it stems from a mix of geopolitical anxiety and concrete economic pain. France's government has made "digital sovereignty" a centerpiece of its tech strategy, with its main digital agency, DINUM, announcing it will abandon Windows in favor of Linux across all government operations . The move is part of a broader mandate requiring all French government agencies to develop migration plans away from non-European digital platforms by this fall. Tens of thousands of public workers have already been shifted off Microsoft Teams and Zoom onto open-source alternatives built with European tools.

The UK's concerns run deeper. A new report from Open Rights Group, titled "Tech Giants and Giant Slayers," argues that Britain has allowed a small group of American megacorporations to entrench themselves across critical infrastructure, shaping not just systems but policy itself . The report points to a troubling precedent: when the US imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Microsoft allegedly shut down email and banking-related services for affected individuals. The implication is stark: if US-UK relations soured, American tech companies could effectively cut off Britain's access to essential services.

The economic argument is equally compelling. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority estimates that at least £500 million per year is being overspent on cloud services alone, before accounting for projects that overrun, suppliers that never quite leave, and legacy systems everyone avoids touching .

What Does Europe's Sovereignty Strategy Actually Look Like?

France's approach centers on three pillars: promoting open-source software like Linux, backing homegrown AI companies like Mistral, and building European cloud infrastructure through providers like OVHcloud . Mistral's CEO Arthur Mensch has become a vocal advocate for what he calls "European-controlled" everything, from data centers to critical AI workloads. The company published its own analysis arguing that relying on foreign tech leaves Europe exposed to political pressure, supply shocks, and lost economic value.

OVHcloud, a French cloud provider, is leaning hard into this moment, spinning up a dedicated defense unit after European ministries came knocking for cloud and AI infrastructure that doesn't carry what the company calls a "Stars-and-Stripes dependency" . The pitch is familiar: secure, sovereign infrastructure for everything from drone coordination to AI-powered command systems. At the same time, OVHcloud is stockpiling hardware and raising prices to stay ahead of rising costs, suggesting the company sees both opportunity and risk in Europe's sovereignty push.

The Banque de France, the country's central bank, is taking a more measured but equally revealing stance. While acknowledging that AI could boost growth and productivity, the institution is deeply concerned about systemic risk, opaque AI models, and an awkward dependence on a handful of big tech providers . Inside the central bank, AI is already everywhere: copilots, regulatory technology tools, and internal automation are quietly reshaping operations. But the real subtext is sovereignty; when your job is to safeguard the financial system, outsourcing your brain to non-European tech starts to look less like innovation and more like a strategic vulnerability.

How Are Governments Building Sovereign Tech Infrastructure?

• Operating System Migration: France's DINUM is replacing Windows with Linux across all government agencies, with full migration plans due by fall. Tens of thousands of public workers have already been moved off Teams and Zoom onto open-source alternatives.
• Cloud and Defense Infrastructure: OVHcloud is building dedicated sovereign cloud services for government ministries, focusing on drone coordination and AI-powered command systems that don't rely on US providers.
• Homegrown AI Models: France is backing Mistral and other European AI startups as alternatives to US models like GPT-4 and Claude, with the goal of keeping AI development and data within European borders.

What Are the Real Costs and Risks of This Strategy?

Here's where the sovereignty narrative hits a wall. France ranks in the global AI top five for talent and adoption, but lags far behind the US and China in models, funding, and scale . The latest Stanford HAI Index shows a nation strong in depth but still struggling to shape the AI frontier. Building sovereign infrastructure means duplicating systems that already exist at scale elsewhere, at enormous cost and with no guarantee of catching up.

The UK's Open Rights Group acknowledges the problem but argues the fix is worth the investment. The report calls for more open-source software, more domestic capability, and a deliberate push toward digital sovereignty, defined as control over infrastructure, data, and technology . As Jim Killock, the group's executive director, stated: "Public money should be spent on public code that benefits us all, rather than lining the pockets of Big Tech's shareholders" .

"For years, a handful of Big Tech companies have used their power to gain control of the UK's digital infrastructure, locking the government into wasteful contracts and shaping tech policy in their favour. This overreliance on foreign tech companies is now an urgent national security issue as well as an economic threat," said Jim Killock, Executive Director at Open Rights Group.

Jim Killock, Executive Director at Open Rights Group

Yet the sovereignty push also reveals a deeper tension. Europe's fragmented approach means different countries are building different systems, creating new silos instead of solving the original problem. France's Linux migration, the UK's sovereign cloud push, and Germany's separate AI initiatives don't add up to a unified European tech ecosystem; they add up to redundancy, complexity, and higher costs for everyone.

The Banque de France's cautious stance hints at this reality. While the central bank is embracing AI internally, it's doing so with one eye on the exit door, aware that true sovereignty might mean accepting slower, less capable systems in exchange for control . That's a trade-off most governments haven't explicitly acknowledged yet.

Is Europe's Sovereignty Strategy Actually Achievable?

The honest answer is: probably not at the scale and speed Europe needs. Building sovereign AI infrastructure requires not just money but talent, and Europe's best AI researchers and engineers are increasingly working for US companies or leaving the continent entirely. Mistral and other European AI startups are trying to close this gap, but they're starting from a position of massive disadvantage in compute resources, training data, and market reach.

The sovereignty push also assumes that Europe can afford to go it alone. But the cost of duplicating US tech infrastructure, maintaining it, and keeping it competitive is staggering. The UK's £500 million annual overspend on cloud services is just the beginning; a full sovereign tech stack would cost multiples of that, every year, indefinitely.

What Europe may actually need is not sovereignty but resilience: the ability to switch providers quickly, maintain multiple options, and avoid lock-in. That's a different problem than building everything from scratch. It requires interoperability standards, open APIs, and regulatory pressure on Big Tech to make switching easier, not a wholesale retreat into homegrown systems.

For now, though, Europe's governments are doubling down on the sovereignty bet. France is migrating to Linux, the UK is warning about Big Tech dependence, and OVHcloud is stockpiling hardware for the defense contracts it expects to win. Whether this strategy actually makes Europe safer, more competitive, or more independent remains an open question. What's certain is that it will be expensive, slow, and incomplete.