The Tech Sovereignty package: How the EU is shaping its own technological future
BDVA welcomes the newly released Tech Sovereignty package, a set of measures that represent a major step towards Europe's aim of becoming a global leader in the digital market, while retaining the capacity to shape its own technological future.
BDVA welcomes the newly released Tech Sovereignty package, a set of measures that represent a major step towards Europe’s aim of becoming a global leader in the digital market, while retaining the capacity to shape its own technological future. Our focus must be set on accelerating the speed of data value generation for European business and society, making companies and the public sector more efficient, competitive and innovative, creating new business opportunities and equipping professionals and citizens with strong data skills. The BDVA community supports the acceleration and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across Europe’s industries and research sectors.
The European Commission has adopted a landmark Tech Sovereignty package aimed not only at strengthening the European Union’s ability to act independently in the digital sphere, but actually growing and developing its data and AI industry, ultimately making it a leader in the trustworthy data and AI market. The initiative marks a significant shift in the EU’s approach to technology policy and is designed to reduce reliance on non-EU providers while boosting Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and strategic autonomy.
Tech sovereignty refers to Europe’s capacity to develop, control and deploy critical technologies, data and digital infrastructure while safeguarding its economic and security interests in an increasingly interconnected world. The package adopted by the Commission includes two major legislative proposals – the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act – alongside a new EU Open Source Strategy and a Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence in Energy. Together, these measures seek to accelerate innovation, strengthen Europe’s digital industrial base and ensure greater control over key technologies.
You can discover the EC’s vision and objectives for the coming years in this presentation.
The European Union currently depends on non-EU countries for more than 80% of critical digital products, services, infrastructure and intellectual property. Reducing this dependency is viewed as crucial to nurturing Europe’s economic prosperity, security and long-term technological leadership.
By strengthening tech sovereignty, the EU aims to enhance competitiveness, resilience and security, secure strategic autonomy in critical digital technologies, support open and fair digital markets, protect citizens’ rights and democratic processes online, and foster innovation across the European economy.
Europe’s progress in digital infrastructure has been significant in recent years, as 7 years ago, Europe had only two supercomputers among the global top ten, while today that number has more than doubled, and work is underway to set up gigafactories. Building on its strong technological base, skilled workforce and tradition in collaborative research, the EU is now seeking to deepen AI integration across key sectors and scientific disciplines.
BDVA is a European non-profit association with over 250 members from industry (including SMEs, startups, and large companies), research, academia, and the public sector, all united by a mission to create value for society and industry through data and AI innovation. The European Commission’s plans and designs of making Europe the epicenter of data and AI are central to BDVA’s mission and objectives.
BDVA, through its many Task Forces, such as Task Force Data Spaces, Task Force GenAI, Task Force Energy, Task Force Policy and Societal or etami, are prepared to support in making Europe a global leader in data and AI. etami, the BDVA Task Force for Trustworthy AI creates processes and tools to enable ethical, trustworthy and legal AI. etami translates European and global principles for ethical AI into actionable and measurable guidelines, tools and methods.
TF Data Spaces aims at achieving secure data sharing, to reach the goals of European data spaces. It currently focuses on AI and Data Spaces, leveraging the vast amount of high-quality data from data spaces to produce and train large AI models, strengthening the connection between AI and data spaces while positioning AI as their key enabler. It proposed AI-ready Data Products, advancing the data product paradigm to better serve AI practitioners and applications, including methods for optimising data preparation for AI.
TF Energy gathers diverse stakeholders involved in the energy value chain. Highly efficient usage of this value chain generates a huge amount of data, which must be mobilised and exploited to respond to the socio-economic stakes of the energy transition and environmental challenges.
TF Gen AI / Foundation Models is currently identifing and analysing real-world applications of GenAI across industries, assessing impact, scalability and business potential, developing strategies to facilitate industrial stakeholders on leveraging GenAI.
TF Policy, Societal and Regulation contributes to BDVA by addressing not only technological developments, but also identifying a number of topics that are policy-related, legal, or societal and linked to such technological developments.
BDVA stands ready to support the European Commission, the Joint Undertakings, Member States, and other partners in turning EC’s designs and plans into tangible outcomes. Close collaborations with community-driven initiatives such as BDVA will be essential to ensuring ground impact and growth of the European data and AI ecosystem.