I'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting:
---
# Capacity
* at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years;
* simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres;
* improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing;
ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensive applications.
---
Given the prevalence of 'degrowth' ideas here in the EU and the severe NIMBY problem (even with stuff as basic as housing let alone data centres), I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to be able to pull this off.
Spain's economy grows but unemployment is still a massive problem because the main industries are seasonal, low-paid agricultural and hospitality work. To switch to a high-tech, high value-add economy would requires deep changes that would be painful for many voters.
The current government still plans to close all the nuclear reactors, it's still hard to get permission for construction (leading to a massive housing crisis despite having a surplus of housing in 2007, before the crisis).
That said, degrowth only seems to be a popular view among the leftist elite and I'm sure that once the consequences start to bite (we had a blackout in Spain, the energy prices are incredibly high in the UK and Germany - leading to a loss of jobs as factories close) then the electorate will profoundly reject this ideology.
You seem somewhat confused about this issue. Degrowth has little to do with abstract economic numbers such as GDP, and precisely criticizes its very concept. Degrowth is an alternative to greenwashing, aka "green growth" destroying our planet in the name of saving it...
Disclaimer: i think you'd consider me into degrowth
> at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years
Who would that benefit? We already have too many of them treating too much data. Mom and pop shops don't need more data centers. Consumers don't need more data centers. Citizens don't need more data centers.
You probably know very well that any new data center will be used exclusively for surveillance technology and so called "artificial intelligence", which in my opinion are net negatives for society.
> ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories
Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software company in the Top 100 companies in the world by market cap. One. And it's that fucking lame piece of uber-shit that SAP is.
SAP: that's what europeans can do. While the US has Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, CloudFlare, etc. Not that these are all great companies but these are heavyweights compared to that pointless, irrelevant, turd that SAP is.
Chips? Besides ASML (which is only part of the chain), we're a wasteland and ASML is mostly US-owned.
Not going to see the next Intel / AMD / NVidia from the EU: that simply is not going to happen. It just won't.
AI gigafactories? Bull-fucking-crap.
The only area where Europe can try something is software but this must be put in perspective: SAP vs all the US software companies.
Don't forget all we could do is SAP. And that is a monstrous piece proprietary lock-in shit.
NOKIA was the only competitive/innovative EU company until US funds with high stakes in MS bought it, planted their trojan horse of a CEO and made it into a headless chicken sacrificed for a chance of MS to stay relevant in the mobile industry.
Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.
You’re describing having a bunch of data centers in different location and enough redundancy. What makes you against data centers themselves? They are just a way to pool resources to benefit from economy of scale. They don’t have to be enormous
Where is the investment coming from (the capital markets union/savings and investment union isn't there so far)? How to make building infrastructure faster? Could some other regulation be removed to aid AI and tech use?
Not convinced adding regulation alone will solve things in European tech.
Countries must do certain things in English to ensure a common language.
Simple liquidation for bankruptcies, register once and operate across the EU.
Places like Germany have loads of talent but are cumbersome to setup a startup etc. This reduces that.
Things won't change overnight but a decade from now things will look a bit different, capital markets won't match the US by then but I expect the dependence trend will start to have reversed. There is no crystal ball for these things.
I look forward to the day we have a sovereign CPU, RAM, storage, ancillary ICs, production line, supply chain, software stack and associated infra than I can walk into a shop and buy and use myself.
I don't think it'll ever happen though. These initiatives are mostly fluff. Throw everything into AI because it's the current fad but not even look at stuff that runs everything RIGHT NOW.
If anything was to happen war-wise, we'll be running everything on recycled trash.
>If anything was to happen war-wise, we'll be running everything on recycled trash.
ESMC should be online in a few years with 16nm class ICs. That will be tech that's over a decade old at that point but it's also "good enough" for anything except AI training.
We have now sovereign CPUs but we are struggling to get HPC ones. They will be there soon though in 5-6 years. RAM is already possible for Europe to manufacture if they can get the fab. Supply chain remains a question mark for the raw materials. Software stack is almost there.
In effect, I would say we are around 60% there. The most important thing actually missing is Fabs. Everything else I see a straightforward path with money and time.
There is a big structural problem in Europe with these sort of initiatives: people receive grants for attacking identified problems; if you actually solve the problem then you have to find a new problem for your next grant, so it's best to not actually solve the problem but claim your next proposal will.
Combine that by not actually wanting to reward people properly when problems are solved and you have the root of why eurotech has totally stagnated.
No true Scostsman, aye me lad. Now really, because big bang doesn't work, means nothing else should be even tried? Are you even from the EU to actually know, or just feel bothered by the anti-US sentiment oozing from those initiatives? If that helps, my feeling is that it's not anti-US, just a normal reaction to the acts and thoughts of the beloved best-leader-ever ruling the US right now, and his faithful elite. It's trying to protect oneselves, maybe a bit of rallying under the (blue) flag, and defeatism has no place in it.
I'm in the UK. My partner is German. I spend a lot of time in the EU.
It's really the "this is fine dog" realising that it's not fine and apathy and poor governmental and corporate decisions over the last 30 years have blown up in our faces.
I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly.
Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out.
That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.
Not sure what to make of this. There is also IPCEI-CIS https://www.8ra.com/ipcei-cis/ but I can't see that in that strategy. Or it is buried somewhere deep.
Funny how they are publishing free advertising for X, fb, yt etc. on their website. This is telling more about the situation than any speaker at the conference will be able to do.
The world isn't built in a day. After years of nothing, the last few months a lot more EU bodies and even national politicians/officials have been joining Mastodon.
It's certainly nowhere near the majority yet, but things are clearly moving.
CNLL communiqué on the adopted EU Tech Sovereignty Package (3 June 2026)
On 3 June 2026, the European Commission adopted the Tech Sovereignty Package — Communication, Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) proposal, and EU Open Source Strategy. The CNLL confirms the essence of the historic shift it had welcomed in late May: open source is elevated to the rank of an instrument of European industrial policy. But the CNLL publicly regrets two significant setbacks introduced between the leaked draft and the adopted text:
- "Open source first" (CADA Article 41) — the title is ambitious, the body is weak. The verb is "encourage", word for word the verb used by France's Digital Republic Law since 2016, with broad derogations ("security, total cost, and any other duly justified objective criterion") and no documented or auditable assessment requirement. The phrase "open source first" appears only in the article's title, not in its body.
- "Public money, public code" (CADA Article 42) — reduced to a conditional cataloguing obligation: the article imposes nothing on the decision to release software, only on the mechanism when an entity discretionarily chooses to do so. The structural publication obligation that the European open source industry has defended for ten years is not in the CADA.
Two further lexical softenings in the Communication: "key lever" became "crucially contributes"; "sovereignty-washing" was removed. The draft promised to go beyond the limit France has known since 2016 — the adopted text reproduces it at European scale.
Confirmed acquis: the OSI definition is now anchored (incl. EUPL); APELL (the European Open Source Business Association) is named in the document; Open Source Maintenance Instrument with fork capability and security-mirroring programme are retained; envelope doubled from 1 to 2 B€ / 7 years (public + private); EuroStack cited in CADA IA study footnote.
The CADA is still a proposal. The CNLL calls for industry and MEP mobilisation over the next twelve months on four priorities: (1) transform Article 41 into an enforceable obligation in the trilogue, with documented/auditable assessment of derogations, in convergence with European OSS editors signatories of the 3 June open letter; (2) mobilise the existing national legal acquis (Article 16 Digital Republic, Article L. 123-4-1 Code de l'éducation, Italian Article 68, German IT-Planungsrat, Dutch frameworks), which becomes proportionally more important; (3) defend the licence-based legal definition of OSS; (4) neutralise the practice of sovereignty washing — push enforceable jurisdictional immunity criteria (no CLOUD Act / FISA exposure) at the highest CADA sovereignty levels.
OK, so a bunch of larger behind-the-times EU tech companies get a few billions over a few years. So what? If they were capable of executing before, they would have been competing already. Some bureaucrat is not going to conjure up desired qualities.
Europe started going backwards from some time. Energy is becoming more expensive, raw materials are becoming more expensive, industry is thickening, jobs are closed, education is not ok, most important tech developments are happening elsewhere, we don't have a thriving startup environment, most large tech companies are established elsewhere.
Maybe we will wake up at some point and do something.
Discourses won't put foot on the table and won't help with economic competition.
Poland is doing fine. Southern Europe is doing very well. Greece is growing superfast. Switzerland is still one the richest and successful countries in the world. Denmark is amazing.
Germany and the UK are the sick men of Europe. France is going brankrupt. Careful with confusing the 19th century superpowers with the whole of Europe. Yes cost of living has increased by which i mean real wages have stalled in many places, but this is worldwide and mostly due to external causes such as rocketing gas and oil prices. If we succeed in making lasting peace with Russia and getting access again to their natural resources, a new golden age may well commence.
I mean, yes - if your biggest external source of energy declares war, and your hitherto trusted defence partner goes rogue - it's going to have a chilling effect and the measures needed to address that will hit both the economy and the populous
I'm cautiously optimistic. The Cloud and AI Development Act looks especially interesting:
---
# Capacity
* at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years;
* simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres;
* improving access to key resources such as energy, land, water and financing; ensuring sufficient computing capacity to support AI, cloud services and data-intensive applications.
---
Given the prevalence of 'degrowth' ideas here in the EU and the severe NIMBY problem (even with stuff as basic as housing let alone data centres), I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to be able to pull this off.
Degrowth was only popular in Germany, UK and Spain. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/no-solid-scientific-basis-deg...
Germany and UK follow a the no growth and it is very unpopular. Spain's economy gives a shit and grows.
Spain's economy grows but unemployment is still a massive problem because the main industries are seasonal, low-paid agricultural and hospitality work. To switch to a high-tech, high value-add economy would requires deep changes that would be painful for many voters.
The current government still plans to close all the nuclear reactors, it's still hard to get permission for construction (leading to a massive housing crisis despite having a surplus of housing in 2007, before the crisis).
That said, degrowth only seems to be a popular view among the leftist elite and I'm sure that once the consequences start to bite (we had a blackout in Spain, the energy prices are incredibly high in the UK and Germany - leading to a loss of jobs as factories close) then the electorate will profoundly reject this ideology.
You seem somewhat confused about this issue. Degrowth has little to do with abstract economic numbers such as GDP, and precisely criticizes its very concept. Degrowth is an alternative to greenwashing, aka "green growth" destroying our planet in the name of saving it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
1 reply →
Disclaimer: i think you'd consider me into degrowth
> at least tripling the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5–7 years
Who would that benefit? We already have too many of them treating too much data. Mom and pop shops don't need more data centers. Consumers don't need more data centers. Citizens don't need more data centers.
You probably know very well that any new data center will be used exclusively for surveillance technology and so called "artificial intelligence", which in my opinion are net negatives for society.
I'm more than cautious too:
> ... initiatives that are interconnected and mutually reinforcing across each stage of the value chain, from chips, to infrastructure, to software, cloud and AI, and in synergy with past and ongoing initiatives such as AI Factories and AI Gigafactories
Software / Cloud: yes, Europe can try to do something but I doubt it. Although it should be pointed out that the EU has one software company in the Top 100 companies in the world by market cap. One. And it's that fucking lame piece of uber-shit that SAP is.
SAP: that's what europeans can do. While the US has Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, CloudFlare, etc. Not that these are all great companies but these are heavyweights compared to that pointless, irrelevant, turd that SAP is.
Chips? Besides ASML (which is only part of the chain), we're a wasteland and ASML is mostly US-owned.
Not going to see the next Intel / AMD / NVidia from the EU: that simply is not going to happen. It just won't.
AI gigafactories? Bull-fucking-crap.
The only area where Europe can try something is software but this must be put in perspective: SAP vs all the US software companies.
Don't forget all we could do is SAP. And that is a monstrous piece proprietary lock-in shit.
NOKIA was the only competitive/innovative EU company until US funds with high stakes in MS bought it, planted their trojan horse of a CEO and made it into a headless chicken sacrificed for a chance of MS to stay relevant in the mobile industry.
> Chips?
Only ST, NXP, Nexperia, Osram, and a bunch more obscure ones. It's not a boom, but it's far from a wasteland
1 reply →
ok how would you recommend to get started? Doing nothing will change nothing.
4 replies →
ARM?
> simplifying and accelerating permitting and deployment of data centres
With the caveat (one hopes) of learning from the mistakes of the US.
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Based on the Iran war situation I don't think we should be building more datacentres for security. They are easy targets. We should be concentrating on resilience and that means distributing capacity and capability where possible.
You’re describing having a bunch of data centers in different location and enough redundancy. What makes you against data centers themselves? They are just a way to pool resources to benefit from economy of scale. They don’t have to be enormous
6 replies →
For distributing having more data centers seems like a prerequisit to me.
One can argue about size etc, though.
You could have written exactly same thing about refineries - from Russian perspective the bigger refinery the bigger target for Ukrainians.
Where is the investment coming from (the capital markets union/savings and investment union isn't there so far)? How to make building infrastructure faster? Could some other regulation be removed to aid AI and tech use?
Not convinced adding regulation alone will solve things in European tech.
Trump's actions are pushing Europeans towards federalisation as a broader trend.
More specifically things like this are happening quietly in the background:
https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-inc-maki...
This mandates a few things:
Countries must do certain things in English to ensure a common language.
Simple liquidation for bankruptcies, register once and operate across the EU.
Places like Germany have loads of talent but are cumbersome to setup a startup etc. This reduces that.
Things won't change overnight but a decade from now things will look a bit different, capital markets won't match the US by then but I expect the dependence trend will start to have reversed. There is no crystal ball for these things.
There is stuff happening but I think most of it is addressing side issues (and cannot address some cores outside of an actual USofE, if then).
For example, how would that overcome local resistance to new infrastructure or reduce the huge amount of (local) regulations in a significant way?
5 replies →
It's ironic that the EU has adopted English as their primary language now that England is no longer in the EU.
4 replies →
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I look forward to the day we have a sovereign CPU, RAM, storage, ancillary ICs, production line, supply chain, software stack and associated infra than I can walk into a shop and buy and use myself.
I don't think it'll ever happen though. These initiatives are mostly fluff. Throw everything into AI because it's the current fad but not even look at stuff that runs everything RIGHT NOW.
If anything was to happen war-wise, we'll be running everything on recycled trash.
>If anything was to happen war-wise, we'll be running everything on recycled trash.
ESMC should be online in a few years with 16nm class ICs. That will be tech that's over a decade old at that point but it's also "good enough" for anything except AI training.
That's enough to do useful work. AI training is useless if you don't have something that'll do office work and supply chain logistics.
We have now sovereign CPUs but we are struggling to get HPC ones. They will be there soon though in 5-6 years. RAM is already possible for Europe to manufacture if they can get the fab. Supply chain remains a question mark for the raw materials. Software stack is almost there.
In effect, I would say we are around 60% there. The most important thing actually missing is Fabs. Everything else I see a straightforward path with money and time.
HPC will always be years away.
There is a big structural problem in Europe with these sort of initiatives: people receive grants for attacking identified problems; if you actually solve the problem then you have to find a new problem for your next grant, so it's best to not actually solve the problem but claim your next proposal will.
Combine that by not actually wanting to reward people properly when problems are solved and you have the root of why eurotech has totally stagnated.
1 reply →
No true Scostsman, aye me lad. Now really, because big bang doesn't work, means nothing else should be even tried? Are you even from the EU to actually know, or just feel bothered by the anti-US sentiment oozing from those initiatives? If that helps, my feeling is that it's not anti-US, just a normal reaction to the acts and thoughts of the beloved best-leader-ever ruling the US right now, and his faithful elite. It's trying to protect oneselves, maybe a bit of rallying under the (blue) flag, and defeatism has no place in it.
I'm in the UK. My partner is German. I spend a lot of time in the EU.
It's really the "this is fine dog" realising that it's not fine and apathy and poor governmental and corporate decisions over the last 30 years have blown up in our faces.
I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly.
Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out.
That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.
What part is copying the US?
Not sure what to make of this. There is also IPCEI-CIS https://www.8ra.com/ipcei-cis/ but I can't see that in that strategy. Or it is buried somewhere deep.
There's going to be a Open Source Policy and Ecosystem Forum on June 8 in Brussels https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-policy-ecosys...
Funny how they are publishing free advertising for X, fb, yt etc. on their website. This is telling more about the situation than any speaker at the conference will be able to do.
The world isn't built in a day. After years of nothing, the last few months a lot more EU bodies and even national politicians/officials have been joining Mastodon.
It's certainly nowhere near the majority yet, but things are clearly moving.
Commentary (in French) from CNLL, the French Open Source Business Association: https://cnll.fr/news/strategie-open-source-europeenne-deux-r...
Here's a TL;DR in English:
CNLL communiqué on the adopted EU Tech Sovereignty Package (3 June 2026)
On 3 June 2026, the European Commission adopted the Tech Sovereignty Package — Communication, Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) proposal, and EU Open Source Strategy. The CNLL confirms the essence of the historic shift it had welcomed in late May: open source is elevated to the rank of an instrument of European industrial policy. But the CNLL publicly regrets two significant setbacks introduced between the leaked draft and the adopted text:
- "Open source first" (CADA Article 41) — the title is ambitious, the body is weak. The verb is "encourage", word for word the verb used by France's Digital Republic Law since 2016, with broad derogations ("security, total cost, and any other duly justified objective criterion") and no documented or auditable assessment requirement. The phrase "open source first" appears only in the article's title, not in its body.
- "Public money, public code" (CADA Article 42) — reduced to a conditional cataloguing obligation: the article imposes nothing on the decision to release software, only on the mechanism when an entity discretionarily chooses to do so. The structural publication obligation that the European open source industry has defended for ten years is not in the CADA.
Two further lexical softenings in the Communication: "key lever" became "crucially contributes"; "sovereignty-washing" was removed. The draft promised to go beyond the limit France has known since 2016 — the adopted text reproduces it at European scale.
Confirmed acquis: the OSI definition is now anchored (incl. EUPL); APELL (the European Open Source Business Association) is named in the document; Open Source Maintenance Instrument with fork capability and security-mirroring programme are retained; envelope doubled from 1 to 2 B€ / 7 years (public + private); EuroStack cited in CADA IA study footnote.
The CADA is still a proposal. The CNLL calls for industry and MEP mobilisation over the next twelve months on four priorities: (1) transform Article 41 into an enforceable obligation in the trilogue, with documented/auditable assessment of derogations, in convergence with European OSS editors signatories of the 3 June open letter; (2) mobilise the existing national legal acquis (Article 16 Digital Republic, Article L. 123-4-1 Code de l'éducation, Italian Article 68, German IT-Planungsrat, Dutch frameworks), which becomes proportionally more important; (3) defend the licence-based legal definition of OSS; (4) neutralise the practice of sovereignty washing — push enforceable jurisdictional immunity criteria (no CLOUD Act / FISA exposure) at the highest CADA sovereignty levels.
OK, so a bunch of larger behind-the-times EU tech companies get a few billions over a few years. So what? If they were capable of executing before, they would have been competing already. Some bureaucrat is not going to conjure up desired qualities.
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Europe started going backwards from some time. Energy is becoming more expensive, raw materials are becoming more expensive, industry is thickening, jobs are closed, education is not ok, most important tech developments are happening elsewhere, we don't have a thriving startup environment, most large tech companies are established elsewhere.
Maybe we will wake up at some point and do something.
Discourses won't put foot on the table and won't help with economic competition.
Poland is doing fine. Southern Europe is doing very well. Greece is growing superfast. Switzerland is still one the richest and successful countries in the world. Denmark is amazing.
Germany and the UK are the sick men of Europe. France is going brankrupt. Careful with confusing the 19th century superpowers with the whole of Europe. Yes cost of living has increased by which i mean real wages have stalled in many places, but this is worldwide and mostly due to external causes such as rocketing gas and oil prices. If we succeed in making lasting peace with Russia and getting access again to their natural resources, a new golden age may well commence.
> Southern Europe is doing very well. Greece is growing superfast.
Citation needed.
I mean, yes - if your biggest external source of energy declares war, and your hitherto trusted defence partner goes rogue - it's going to have a chilling effect and the measures needed to address that will hit both the economy and the populous
Why would measures aiming to create more energy supply necessarily hit the economy and the populous?
6 replies →