It is difficult for Europe to part with American and Chinese technology

The French government said this year it would replace Zoom and other American video conferencing software with an alternative developed in France. Germany is building a domestic platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to create AI chips to compete with those from the United States and China.

These are modest steps in Europe’s high-stakes race to catch up with America and China in the global sprint for digital independence. Without it, European political and business leaders fear they will be vulnerable to sudden losses of access to critical technologies, such as after President Trump’s recent decision to cut off foreigners from some of Anthropic’s latest AI models. They will also lose income from a thriving industry.

However, interviews with industry leaders, public officials, entrepreneurs and economists suggest that there is currently little doubt that Europe can break away from technological dependence any time soon.

It can’t.

Instead, political and business leaders across the continent are grappling with a more limited but still daunting question. If full independence is not possible, where should Europe focus its digital efforts in pursuit of at least partial autonomy?

“One hundred percent autonomy in digital services is not something that is possible at this stage,” said Anne Le Hénanff, France’s minister for artificial intelligence and digital affairs. “We need to decide what we don’t want to be dependent on.”

European consumers and businesses rely heavily on American and Chinese imports for their digital lives, including social media, national security systems and artificial intelligence. They store data with US companies such as Amazon, despite European concerns about the relatively laxity of US data protection rules. Multinational companies based in Europe, such as Mercedes-Benz, perfect some of their most important new technologies in Chinese laboratories.

Europe has one homegrown big language model, Mistral AI, a three-year-old start-up that is France’s national AI champion and now valued at $14 billion. The three founders of Mistral worked for Google and Meta before founding the company.

Technology executives acknowledge that France does not yet have a funding culture like that of Silicon Valley to incubate promising start-ups. In France and much of Europe, business leaders complain that companies must move to America to expand.

Continental leaders have come to see this reliance as dangerous, both strategically and economically, as Washington and Beijing bolderly use brute force to bend other countries to their will. They say it leaves them more vulnerable to cyber attacks and economic and diplomatic pressure from powerful governments that may not share Europe’s democratic values.

“We need nothing more and nothing less than technological sovereignty in Europe, and thus in Germany, at least where it is achievable,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said last fall. As he warned, Europe’s technological dependence was being “exploited for power politics”.

Last week the Netherlands announced plans create government-controlled data centers to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of foreign companies.

Last month, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said his country’s domestic intelligence service would stop using AI data tools from US technology company Palantir in favor of tools from French company ChapsVision.

“Just as we disagree with moving our national archives to California, we must use our own AI tools,” Mr. Lecornu said in a statement. video posted on social media.

Relying on foreign technology can be dangerous even for the private sector. Many European companies depend on Chinese data storage products and cannot guarantee that their data will not be shared with Chinese intelligence, said Sebastian Kurz, a former chancellor of Austria. He is now president of Dream, which sells AI security systems that exist entirely in one country to Western clients, including governments.

That dependency, Kurz said in an interview, is problematic if it affects “sensitive data in sectors like healthcare where people feel the need for their data to be protected.”

Governments across Europe are spending billions of euros to try to shake off these addictions for themselves and their societies – at least in selected areas.

The French government has pledged to spend about $5.3 billion to buy digital tools from French companies.

German government plans to spend more than $20 billion over the next few years six key technology industriesincluding artificial intelligence and biotechnology. He contracted with the German companies Deutsche Telekom and SAP to build the government AI platform which can be completely separated from rivals such as China and America.

Germany’s government innovation agency has launched a roughly $140 million fund to accelerate investment in European start-ups in areas such as artificial intelligence. At a conference sponsored by the agency this spring, officials said they hope to not so much replace American and Chinese technology companies as work with them — and become indispensable to their operations.

Dorothee Bär, Germany’s Federal Minister for Research, Technology and Space, noted in an interview at the conference that German start-ups played a role at the launch of the NASA Artemis II rocket.

“These interdependencies are also important, and Americans in particular see that we have our own strengths,” Ms. Bär said. America in the Trump era, she added, “responds exclusively to force.”

German tech leaders are particularly excited about their chances to build on the country’s original manufacturing strength and promote exportable high-tech products such as advanced versions of factory tooling equipment.

“There are certain areas where Europe actually has an edge,” said Antonio Krüger, executive director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. “This is an asset that I don’t think the U.S. and China currently have at that level of quality and quantity.”

Europe’s technological strengths also include basic research, said Anne Bouverot, chairperson of a government committee for generative artificial intelligence. She pointed to the cooperation between the Fraunhofer laboratories in Germany and the French research laboratory CEA in the development of next-generation chips for AI.

But Europe remains weak in generating capital to finance tech companies as they scale, Ms. Bouverot said. Mistral raised $1.5 billion by selling a stake in a Dutch company. But that remains an exceptional case.

“We need to be able to better finance start-ups in Europe,” Ms Bouverot said. “There is a lot of savings in Europe. Today, these savings are not used enough for start-ups. They either go to the US or stay in risk-free investments.”

Ms. Bouverot said that Europe will never completely turn away from Silicon Valley. She said the idea was for European countries to carve out autonomy in strategic digital areas – to make them less vulnerable, for example, to service disruptions or sensitive data breaches.

This is very different from the full vision of digital independence that some leaders are promising. And it is not enough for those who say that Europe needs to break free from America and China for purely economic reasons — to profit from the next wave of technology sales boom.

“For me, the whole point of sovereignty is not security and resilience,” said Cristina Caffarra, chair of the EuroStack Initiative Foundation, which works to strengthen Europe’s digital industry.

“It’s not a democracy and all that,” she said. “It’s a value capture.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.