EU tech sovereignty push driven by US trust collapse after Greenland episode

Something shifted in transatlantic relations early this year when the White House tried to acquire Greenland. The attempt to annex an autonomous territory within Denmark, a NATO ally, failed. But for European officials, the episode confirmed that Washington could no longer be treated as a dependable partner. The consequences are now rippling through digital policy, where Brussels is accelerating plans to break Europe's dependence on American technology that, just a few years ago, would have seemed unremarkable.

Greenland as the turning point

President Trump's push to take control of Greenland was not, on the surface, a technology story. The self-governing Danish territory rejected Washington's advances, and the proposal went nowhere. Yet for European capitals, the episode crystallised a fear that had been building: the United States was prepared to act against the sovereignty of its own allies. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told his ministers at the time that if the sovereignty of a European ally were affected, "the cascading consequences would be unprecedented," according to a government read-out.

Those consequences are now taking shape in the digital sphere. European policymakers had already been moving towards greater technological autonomy. Von der Leyen made digital sovereignty a theme of her second term as European Commission president, which began in 2024. The Greenland episode hardened the political resolve behind that agenda. If Washington could disregard the territorial integrity of a NATO member, the reasoning went, how could Europe trust it with the infrastructure that keeps hospitals running, energy grids stable and government communications secure?

The European Technological Sovereignty Package

In June, the Commission published its European Technological Sovereignty Package. The proposals target high-end semiconductors and AI-focused computing infrastructure to be built within the bloc. The package also emphasises open-source technologies as a counterweight to the AI models controlled by American companies. Von der Leyen made the strategic intention plain: Europe would build its own capability rather than rely on others for the technologies that underpin essential services.

The Commission has been directing billions of euros of public funds into digital infrastructure, including high-performance computing, since before the sovereignty package was formally announced. The Commission's digital strategy has gradually expanded from regulation, where Brussels has led globally with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Markets Act, into industrial policy aimed at building European capacity.

The package did not name the United States. It did not need to. The target was obvious. The question is whether the ambition matches the means.

The gap between rhetoric and resources

Brussels talks about technological sovereignty with conviction. The practicalities are less convincing. Europe's digital industries are overwhelmingly dominated by American companies. OpenAI, Amazon and Google have collectively earmarked hundreds of billions of dollars for digital infrastructure, sums that no European government or consortium can match. Cash-strapped national budgets across the bloc cannot compete with the capital flowing from American technology groups into data centres, chip fabrication and AI research.

Blockbuster EU-funded infrastructure projects have a habit of running late, running over budget, or running into the sand. The European Chips Act, intended to double the EU's share of global semiconductor production to 20 per cent by 2030, has attracted commitments from companies including Intel and TSMC, but actual fabrication plants remain years from operation. The sovereignty package faces the same structural problem: political announcements travel faster than construction schedules.

Europe's open-source problem

The Commission's bet on open-source technology as a European alternative to proprietary American AI models runs into an awkward fact: much of the world's open-source development happens outside Europe. US-based developers accounted for the largest share of open-source contributions globally in 2025. An open-source model built elsewhere is not, by definition, a European sovereign asset.

A European government discovered this directly when it tested an open-source model developed by a non-EU company and found it carried significant biases that officials had not anticipated. The episode was described at a digital sovereignty workshop held under the Chatham House Rule in June, organised by the Atlantic Council's Democracy and Tech Initiative. Open-source software, in other words, is not inherently trustworthy simply because it is open. The code may be visible, but the values embedded in it reflect where it was built.

Internal divisions over decoupling

The 27 member states do not agree on how far to push the separation. France has gone furthest, treating digital sovereignty as an extension of the strategic autonomy agenda Macron has promoted for years. Paris sees reduced dependence on American technology as both an economic opportunity and a security requirement.

Poland and other Eastern European states take a different view. For them, American technology companies are not just suppliers; they are part of a security relationship that matters more, not less, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Cutting ties with US tech firms would weaken defences that these countries consider essential. The national security argument runs directly counter to the sovereignty argument, and there is no sign of a compromise that satisfies both camps.

This is not a minor disagreement. EU digital policy requires broad support from member states to function. The Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act passed because they regulated foreign companies, which suited almost everyone. Building European alternatives is harder, because it requires domestic governments to spend money they do not have on projects that may not succeed, and to accept that some allies will continue buying American.

The shared priorities neither side will admit

The trust deficit between Brussels and Washington is real, entrenched and politically charged. It is also obscuring the fact that European and American regulators are converging on many of the same outcomes, through different legal frameworks.

Meta's recent settlement with California authorities over social media practices mirrors findings by the European Commission against both Meta and TikTok. American and European antitrust regulators have both secured victories against Google's app store practices. Both sides of the Atlantic need an agreement on how national law enforcement agencies can access electronic evidence in criminal investigations. The practical overlap is substantial.

Yet these areas of cooperation are currently non-starters. The political atmosphere makes it impossible for either side to acknowledge, publicly, what many policymakers will concede in private: there is still more that unites Brussels and Washington on technology regulation than divides them. Admitting as much would invite criticism from domestic audiences who expect their leaders to stand firm. So both sides posture, and the practical work stalls.

What China and Russia see

The transatlantic fracture has not gone unnoticed in Moscow and Beijing. Both governments have been pushing their own models of technology governance: state-controlled, surveillance-enabled, and available for export to countries that want digital infrastructure without Western conditions attached. A Europe that cannot build its own technology and cannot trust American suppliers is a Europe that may find itself with fewer options, not more.

This is the strategic risk that the sovereignty debate tends to overlook. Reducing dependence on the United States only improves European autonomy if there is a credible alternative. If the alternative does not exist, or cannot be built quickly enough, the practical effect of decoupling from American technology could be to weaken Europe's position rather than strengthen it.