European tech leaders advise caution on tech sovereignty drive

European tech leaders at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, warned against an overzealous approach to digital sovereignty that shuts out US technology suppliers.

“We have to be careful about the discourse around sovereignty,” said Aiman Ezzat, CEO of French IT services firm Capgemini, in a panel discussion on Thursday.

Ezzat cited Mario Draghi’s influential 2024 report on European Union competitiveness, in which the former European Central Bank President linked lagging productivity growth in Europe to lower technology adoption.

Regulations designed to enforce digital sovereignty could slow technology adoption in Europe and “further deplete the competitiveness of European industry,” Ezzat warned.

“We have to go for technology adoption as fast as possible. And, yes, sometimes it is going to be at the expense of sovereignty,” he said.

In a Bloomberg interview at Davos, Börje Ekholm, CEO of Swedish telecom equipment firm Ericsson, said that recent discussions around sovereignty are “dangerous,” and that attempts to build homegrown alternatives to US technology would lead to higher prices in the region.

At the same time, Capgemini’s Ezzat noted a “huge amount of dependency” on US technology that has led to “exposure and risk.”

He said Europe’s reliance on US technology is due, in part, to a weak domestic cloud sector that stems from a lack of available investment capital during the 2010s. A 2025 Synergy Research report found that European cloud providers now account for just 15% of the region’s cloud market. “We did not invest early enough in the cloud to be able to create a European cloud player,” he said.

Ezzat called for a balanced approach to digital sovereignty. “Remember, sovereignty is not one monolithic thing. It’s not ‘either we have or we don’t have,’” he said.

European countries are already positioned to ensure data, operational, and regulatory sovereignty, said Ezzat. Technological sovereignty is more challenging, however. “There are four layers, and we can control three out of the four,” he said. “On the technology side, we’re going to have to make the compromise while we’re trying, at the same time, to build our own stack in some places,” he said.

Technological sovereignty spans several layers, said Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of Polish voice AI startup ElevenLabs, during the panel discussion. This includes energy and compute, as well as foundational models and how these models are applied in production by companies and governments.

He said that partnering with global providers of foundational models makes sense, while European firms can compete and “flourish” further up the stack by focusing on data and AI applications that sit on top of these models.

In Europe, the topic of sovereignty can be “very emotional — maybe too emotional,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein, also speaking during the panel discussion.

He said some dependence on US hardware is unavoidable, but the ability to switch infrastructure providers limits the risk. Sovereignty efforts should then focus on the data layer as a priority, he said.

“I can port any ERP from one infrastructure to another in four weeks. I cannot port a customer from an SAP supply chain software wanting mission critical manufacturing in four weeks from one system to another,” said Klein.

“We need to spend more time on having better access to data and really playing a game which the US and China have not yet played.”

More on the digital sovereignty push in Europe:

Europe votes to tackle deep dependence on US tech in sovereignty drive

Global uncertainty is reshaping cloud strategies in Europe

EU looks to bolster its open-source sector to counter US cloud dominance

Nadella redefines ‘sovereignty’ for the AI era — analysts call it smart, self‑serving

AWS European cloud service launch raises questions over sovereignty

Source:: Computer World