Europe’s dependence on American technology has long been an abstract concern for policymakers. But as the transatlantic alliance continues to fray, most recently over Donald Trump's push to acquire Greenland, that reliance is being reframed as a strategic liability.
From a marginal share of AI computing power and models that trail the technological frontier, to a cloud ecosystem dominated by American firms, the EU’s digital economy runs largely on US-controlled infrastructure.
That dependence, critics warn, leaves the continent exposed to political pressure, and even the possibility that Washington could weaponise technology access in a crisis.
But according to MEPs, economists, and analysts who spoke with The Parliament, it’s also a vulnerability Europe could still address. Their answer: “EuroStack,” a broad vision to rebuild Europe’s digital supply chain so that core technologies can run independently of US firms.
“It’s so obvious that it’s not a good idea to be a digital colony of the US,” said MEP Alexandra Geese (Greens/EFA, DE). “And I think we have a window right now to break out of that.”
The harsh realities of AI dependence
The EU has fallen far behind both the US and China in the AI race — forfeiting not just economic upside but also long-term security advantages.
“Europe is pretty substantially behind when it comes to developing the models, housing the computer infrastructure, and attracting VC funding and talent,” said Daan Juijn, a senior advanced AI researcher at the Centre for Future Generations.
For example, the EU houses a mere 5% of global computing infrastructure and receives roughly 6% of global venture capital funding in artificial intelligence, according to a December report by Rand and the Centre for Future Generations. The US and China dominate both.
Giorgos Verdi, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, outlined a hypothetical escalation scenario in which Washington weaponises Europe's dependency by limiting chips exports, restricting access to AI models, capping cloud computing capacity or even shutting down Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service that covers much of Europe.
If Washington pushed ahead with such a strategy, there’s little that Europe could do right now, Verdi said.
Even less dramatic disruptions can have outsized effects. For example, when cloud provider Amazon Web Services suffered an outage in October, apps and digital services across Europe — including systems used by the European Commission — went offline. The episode raised questions about why EU institutions still rely so heavily on American providers.
There are also mounting economic costs of falling behind. As of January 2026, more than 80% of European AI chatbot users relied on OpenAI's ChatGPT. That means European data — the raw material of the modern information economy — is flowing primarily into American algorithms rather than European ones.
But Europe does have certain leverages. For instance, ASML, the Dutch firm that has a monopoly on advanced lithography equipment essential for chip manufacturing, could be weaponised, too. In extremis, Brussels could restrict exports to the US.
Still, leverage is not a substitute for autonomy. As Verdi pointed out, if Europe lacks a company capable of operating at the AI frontier, it will lose out on both the economic and security advantages AI systems increasingly provide.
How America pulled ahead on AI
Europe’s technological dependence isn’t the result of a longstanding scientific deficit. According to Harry Law, a researcher on the history of artificial intelligence at the University of Cambridge, European research in statistics, pattern recognition and machine learning was on par with the US well into the 2000s.
The divergence came in the 2010s, when AI progress shifted from algorithmic advances to compute-heavy model training. Around the same time, the Big Tech boom in the US spurred high-risk, high-reward investments into technologies like AI. While Americans were “loss tolerant,” Law said, European investors were not.
As a result, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, America — not Europe — was positioned to capitalise.
The continued US success, Law said, had little to do with scientific quality and a lot to do with feedback loops between money, infrastructure and prestige. “This is a classic example of the ‘Matthew effect,’ where those with initial advantages accumulate more while those with disadvantages fall further behind,” he said.
While Europe has a near-frontier AI company, Paris-based Mistral AI, it’s still lags American and Chinese models on key benchmarks like speed and features, such as the context window which serves as the “working memory” of the AI. As of September, analysts estimated Mistral’s market share to be around 2%. It's valuation of $13.7 billion also pales in comparison to OpenAI's $500 billion estimation.
Still, Mistral has excelled in developing smaller, open models that can be fine-tuned for individual business cases — further evidence, perhaps, that Europe has talented engineers but lack capital and infrastructure.
At the World Economic Forum's annual meeting last week in Davos, Switzerland, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said Europe risks becoming “a colony in AI,” potentially leading to a future where “95% of digital services and AI being imported from the US.” That dependence, he said, could be undercut if Europe invests decisively as AI spawns new downstream technologies.
That logic also underpins the EuroStack vision — that Europe has the talent, but not the capital or tech infrastructure, to compete with the American giants.
What EuroStack actually means
To MEP Axel Voss (EPP, DE) Europe is already a “digital colony” of the US. He told The Parliament that Europe should cut its dependence on US technology services from 80% to 40% by 2030. Meanwhile, Geese of the Greens/EFA said that digital technologies are a “power infrastructure” that Europe must nurture independently to become truly sovereign.
Both argue technological independence requires muscular industrial policy, changes to public procurement law and more funding for high-risk technologies. Together, those elements form what has been labeled EuroStack.
What that means in practice, though, is still contested. To some, it's about trying to eliminate the role of US digital technologies in Europe’s digital supply chain, from AI models to semiconductor chips.
To others, it simply means boosting European firms to be more competitive.
So far, the European Parliament’s focus has been the latter. For example, the Cloud and AI Development Act and the European Chips Act aim to strengthen Europe’s tech ecosystem, Geese said.
But the effects of industrial policy require time. Cristina Caffarra, founder of the EuroStack Industry Initative, a group pushing for European industrial policy to bolster the continent's digital and tech ecosystem, told The Parliament that the fastest win is also the simplest: buy European.
European institutions, for example, run almost exclusively on Microsoft Teams, an American technology, even though there are scores of European alternatives.
A ‘Buy European’ provision would provide a steady stream of public contracts to support Europe’s up and coming tech companies — and a shift from an EU approach centered on regulating American tech firms rather than supporting European ones.
“It has become the sole obsession of Europe for months to tame Big Tech,” said Caffarra. “News flash. We were not taming, we are not taming, and we will not tame Big Tech.”
Europe’s tech stack leverage
But others have poured cold water on the EuroStack vision, saying it’s not realistic for Europe to rapidly decouple from American technology, and that it may not need to.
Nicole Lemke, a senior policy researcher on AI at Interface, said European models don’t need to be at the global frontier to gain adoption. Strong, compliant models built to European data protection standards could gradually push out American models, without any kind of favouring of European technology.
Others favour integration over decoupling. Instead of building a separate EuroStack, Zach Meyers, the director of research at Brussels-based Center on Regulation in Europe, argues European firms should be better integrated into the American tech stack. German firm SAP’s dominance in US enterprise software is a case in point.
“We need to make sure we’re indispensable,” Meyers said. In the case of a conflict, it’s “mutually assured destruction.”
Sign up to The Parliament's weekly newsletter
Every Friday our editorial team goes behind the headlines to offer insight and analysis on the key stories driving the EU agenda. Subscribe for free here.