Launching at a pivotal moment for Europe’s digital future, the inaugural Sovereign Tech Europe conference provided a dedicated platform to explore the ambition underpinning Europe’s growing focus on technological sovereignty.

 

Reflecting this sense of urgency and ambition, this inaugural edition convened nearly 300 participants from across the ecosystem. Policymakers, legislators, industry leaders, and technology experts came together for the first edition to examine questions of autonomy, resilience, innovation, and competitiveness in an increasingly complex global landscape.

 

Anne Le Hénanff, France's Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs delivers our opening keynote address

Defining Europe's Sovereignty 

The conference’s opening hour established a clear thesis that the rest of the day would extend, refine, and, at times, challenge. Paul Adamson, Chairman of Forum Europe, framed the central question underpinning the discussions: as European policymakers move from declaratory ambition to the construction of a sovereign technological base, what does this transition look like in practice, and which policy instruments will prove most effective?

In this context, Anne Le Hénanff, France’s Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, opened the keynote programme by outlining three operational principles for European digital sovereignty: visibility, support, and values.

Europe must develop a clear understanding of its dependencies, she noted, alongside active support for sovereign solutions. Crucially, these efforts must remain anchored in distinctly European values. Those such as environmental responsibility, openness and interoperability, and robust data protection.

Looking ahead to France’s forthcoming G7 Presidency, Minister Le Hénanff highlighted a number of priorities in the digital domain, including protecting minors online, ensuring safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence, and advancing a positive international agenda for digital cooperation.

 

“The internal market is a strength but it is too fragmented. There are still too many barriers in the internal market. And we have too complex rules.”
Xavier Coget, Member of Cabinet, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Henna Virkkunen. 

In response, Xavier Coget, a member of Executive Vice President Virkkunen’s Cabinet, outlined the Commission’s diagnostic. Europe, he noted, possesses significant savings, roughly double that of the United States in absolute terms, but lacks the venture capital scale and public investment posture needed to translate this capital into industrial leadership. At the same time, the internal market remains fragmented, and while regulation is necessary, its growing complexity risks slowing innovation.

Coget identified four key strands of Commission work aimed at addressing these structural gaps:

• Simplification: Efforts to streamline the regulatory environment, including a proposed “28th regime” for company law, alongside digital and AI omnibus packages, and initiatives such as digital and business wallets to facilitate cross-border identity and document flows.
• Unlocking Investment: Advancing the Savings and Investment Union and building on the Capital Markets Union, including reforms to enable institutional investors, such as pension funds, to take on more venture-style risk.
• Scaling Funding: A proposed fivefold increase in technology funding under the next Multi-annual Financial Framework, supported by the creation of a dedicated scale-up fund.
• Horizontal Approach: Positioning sovereignty as a cross-cutting priority across upcoming initiatives, including the Tech Sovereignty Package and revisions to key industrial frameworks such as the Chips Act.

In focus: Xavier Coget, Member of Cabinet, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Henna Virkkunen. 

Analysing Europe's Next Regulatory Chapter

Reflecting the themes set out in the preceding keynotes, the conference’s opening session revealed a degree of substantive disagreement beneath the surface consensus.

Aura Salla MEP, rapporteur for the Digital Omnibus regulation, offered one of the most pointed political assessments of the day. While welcoming the Commission’s focus on simplification, she drew on her experience in technology and digital policy to pose a fundamental question: does Europe’s regulatory framework truly work for companies at scale?

Salla also advanced the idea of a Sovereignty Fund, arguing that a dedicated, properly capitalised instrument would be more effective than a fragmented set of cross-cutting digital programmes spread across the EU budget.

Casper Klynge, Vice-President for Government Partnerships at Zscaler and former Danish Tech Ambassador, brought a perspective shaped by both public and private sector experience. The mood in Europe, he observed, has shifted. Indeed, it had arguably matured. He pointed to the United States–China dynamic now underpinning many European technology decisions, noting that industry has increasingly begun to internalise the same strategic vocabulary long used by policymakers.

“European technology will not become a global force through regulatory protection alone. Demand is what builds industries.”
Victoria de Posson, Secretary General, European Tech Alliance 

Despite this sentiment, the diagnosis of Victoria de Posson, Secretary General of the European Tech Alliance, was both sympathetic and unsentimental: demand for European technology within Europe has historically been weak, and the central challenge now is to better align regulatory ambition with market realities.

In this context, Radu Antohe, Head of EU Public Sector at Tremend – Publicis Sapient, offered a practitioner’s perspective from the systems integration side. The market for European sovereign technology, he noted, does exist, but it is the complexity of integration that continues to hold it back.

Session 1: featuring Casper Klynge, Aura Salla and Forum Europe's Paul Adamson

Views from beyond Europe, Japan and the United Kingdom

The day was punctuated by two interventions from outside the European Union, scheduled at different points in the agenda but united by a common thesis: that European technological sovereignty, properly understood, is best advanced in partnership with like-minded allies.

 

“Our goal should not be to build walls, but to ensure that our interdependence is managed within a circle of trust.’’
Takashi Hamada, Deputy Chief of Mission, Mission of Japan to the European Union

Takashi Hamada, Deputy Chief of Mission and Ambassador at Japan’s Mission to the European Union, set out a Japanese conception of technological sovereignty. This is one that predates and in many ways informs Europe’s current debate. Japan, he noted, has been grappling with questions of strategic autonomy and indispensability since the late 2010s.

The framework Japan has developed rests on two complementary pillars: strategic autonomy: the ability to resist external coercion, and strategic indispensability: the capacity to provide capabilities that other economies cannot easily replace. In this view, sovereignty is not absolute but relational: a country’s autonomy is strengthened, rather than diminished, through participation in a trusted network of like-minded partners.

 

Takashi Hamada, Deputy Chief of Mission and Ambassador at the Japanese Mission to the European Union, in conversation with Paul Adamson. 

 

“Sovereignty really in this context means resilient interdependence, because you can't really see successful sovereignty as autarky.”
Lindsay Croisdale-Appleby,Ambassador and Head, UK Mission to the European
Union

Lindsay Croisdale-Appleby, Ambassador and Head of the UK Mission to the European Union, elucidated similarly. The UK's position, he argued, is one of resilient interdependence with the European Union: a partner outside the bloc but inside the regulatory and values framework that the European sovereignty agenda assumes.

Asked about the inherent tension between sovereignty and openness, and on what UK industry could realistically offer to a European agenda from which it sits, formally, outside, Croisdale-Appleby was insightful. His answer was a defence of practical cooperation: medical-data uses, defence-applicable technologies, deep-tech partnerships, and joint investment in scale-up rounds were all areas in which the UK and EU are already finding routes to work together. The reset he described in UK–EU technology relations, he suggested, is now under way.

 

Lindsay Croisdale-Appleby, Ambassador and Head of the UK Mission to the European Union, in conversation with the FT's Paolo Tamma. 

Open Source as a Pillar of Strategic Autonomy

The morning's fireside chat, moderated by Zach Meyers, Director of Research at the Centre on Regulation in Europe, returned the conversation to a more granular layer of the technology stack.

The session was grounded in the premise that open source is foundational to Europe’s digital economy and that Europe is comparatively strong in both talent and contribution, yet it has not been treated as critical infrastructure in policy terms.

Paul Sharratt, Policy and Research Lead at Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency, outlined how targeted public funding can support the maintenance of critical open-source projects that would otherwise rely on volunteers. He argued that this model is now ready to scale at the European level, with the forthcoming European Open Source Strategy presenting an opportunity to establish a stable funding framework.

 

“There is a role for the European Union to step in and we could have a globally important role if it would be done right, funding the maintainers, because that is where the weakest element in the chain currently is.”
Laszlo Igneczi, Executive Director, OpenForum Europe

 

Fireside Chat: Open Source as an Enabler of Digital Sovereignty, Cybersecurity and Competitiveness. 

Laszlo Igneczi, Executive Director of OpenForum Europe, reinforced the case for increased public investment, noting that the weakest point in the open-source ecosystem is the funding of maintainers. He also challenged the perceived tension between open source and sovereignty, arguing that its non-proprietary nature makes it well-suited to Europe’s strategic autonomy agenda, provided engagement remains global.

 

“The most engaged developers, by every available measure, are those who participate actively in open-source projects.”
Felix Reda, Senior Director of Developer Policy, GitHub. 

Felix Reda, Senior Director of Developer Policy at GitHub, called for greater regulatory clarity to ensure that obligations placed on commercial users of open-source software do not inadvertently undermine the ecosystem itself. He also highlighted the link between open source and developer quality, noting that the most engaged developers are those active in open-source communities, an important factor for the productivity and competitiveness of European tech firms.

 

Offering a candid perspective - Philippe Van Damme, Deputy Director-General at DG DIGIT

The Public Sector as Lead Customer

The morning's final session turned to the public sector itself: the largest single customer in the European digital economy and the actor whose procurement decisions, more than any other factor, shape what European technology firms can sustain at scale.

To begin, Richard van Wageningen, President for Europe at Orange Business, framed sovereignty as a layered concept: from data sovereignty, to operational control, through to full technology-stack sovereignty across hardware and software. Each layer, he explained, has its own definitional and operational complications. As a result, real sovereignty, he argued, requires conscious choices at each layer rather than a single declaration. 

Philippe Van Damme, Deputy Director-General at DG DIGIT, offered a candid, operational perspective. He outlined the design of the Commission’s recent €180 million sovereign cloud tender, awarded to four European-led consortia. The approach, he explained, was to enable competitive European providers to succeed on commercial terms, with sovereignty treated as a qualification rather than a subsidy. This aimed at backing credible players, not creating them.

 

“Sovereignty is the freedom to say no, or to choose. It is not the obligation to choose from a specific set of providers.”
Christian Zahorski-Philippe, Head of Public Sector Cloud Practice, NTT Data Europe and LATAM. 

Christian Zahorski-Philippe, Head of Public Sector Cloud Practice at NTT DATA Europe and LATAM, spoke from a systems-integrator perspective. Public-sector customers, he noted, are increasingly embedding sovereignty requirements into procurement specifications, something rarely seen just two years ago. This shift is already reshaping conversations between integrators, customers, and technology partners.

Ruben Maris, Chief Operating Officer at De Cronos Groep, described a similar shift, but framed it as cultural rather than technical. Customers, he argued, are beginning to internalise principles such as sovereignty, predictability, transparency, and control. Thus moving beyond compliance towards genuine demand, which is proving a more durable driver than regulation alone. 


President of EMEA at Lenovo, Matt Dobrodziej, delivers an interview at the event.

Infrastructure, Compute and the Limits of European Ambition

Opening the afternoon, Cristina Caffarra, Founder and Chair of the EuroStack Initiative Foundation, set the diagnostic frame. European demand for European technology remains weak, she argued, with capital continuing to flow into non-European venture markets at scale.

She also outlined the concept of the EuroStack. A proposed European industrial policy initiative designed to align technology, governance, and funding. The aim is to drive investment in and adoption of a suite of European digital infrastructures, spanning connectivity, cloud computing, AI, and digital platform. 

Juxtoposing this, Keegan McBride, Director of Science and Technology at the Tony Blair Institute, called for analytical realism. Europe’s share of global compute capacity, he noted, remains in the single digits, with individual US hyperscaler builds now exceeding the scale of Europe’s planned AI gigafactories. The implication was not that Europe should abandon infrastructure, but that it must be clear-eyed about its position and build on its comparative strengths.

Matt Dobrodziej, President of EMEA at Lenovo, reinforced this point. Europe, he argued, possesses significant but underutilised advantages - from its research base to its expertise in photonics and lithography. What is lacking is sustained, large-scale industrial procurement to translate these strengths into global competitiveness.

 

“Europe quietly became a technology superpower without quite noticing.”
Clark Parsons, CEO, European Start-Up Network (ESN) 

 

Clark Parsons argued that Europe’s start-up ecosystem already contains the necessary demand, if it can be effectively unlocked. He pointed to a striking statistic: technology’s share of European GDP has grown from four to fifteen per cent over the past decade, suggesting that Europe has, in many ways, become a technology powerhouse without fully recognising it.

The final session of the day featured Matthew King, Head of Unit for Digital and Data Sovereignty at the Joint Research Centre.

Cloud, Capital and Sovereign Interdependence

Circling back to cloud, the day’s closing panel, moderated by Martin Hullin of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, examined the prospects for an interoperable European cloud market.

Laura Eiro, Director General at the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications, opened with a public-sector perspective. Europe, she argued, already has the regulatory foundations in place; what is lacking is speed. While initiatives such as the Cloud and AI Development Act and the Tech Sovereignty Package will help, industry operates on a 12–18 month horizon, not a five-year one.

Matthew King, Head of Unit for Digital and Data Sovereignty at the Joint Research Centre, highlighted fragmentation as the central risk. If Member States pursue separate sovereign procurement frameworks, providers will struggle to achieve the scale needed for innovation. To address this, he suggested greater coordination, with public authorities working towards common approaches and metrics for specifying sovereignty in procurement.

 

“Sovereignty is risk management on business continuity. Where the awareness is sharpest is in critical infrastructure.”
Charles Van Omermeire, Executive Director, Digital Services Europe, Orange Business

Charles van Overmeire, Executive Director for Digital Services Europe at Orange Business, framed sovereignty primarily as risk management. Demand is most acute among operators of critical infrastructure (e.g. energy, telecoms, and banking) who are increasingly driving uptake of sovereign cloud solutions.

Chris Gow, Senior Director for EU Public Policy at Cisco, offered the perspective of a global provider operating at scale in Europe. In his view, the debate has matured, building on existing national frameworks such as France’s Cloud au Centre and Italy’s PSN. The emerging Cloud Sovereignty Framework is notable for its breadth, extending beyond data and jurisdiction to include sustainability, interoperability, and supply chains. Gow also emphasised the practical reality that most European customers will continue to rely on a mix of European and non-European technologies, making interoperability and robust contractual safeguards the most productive focus for policy.

Anne Duboscq, Director of Public Affairs at OVHcloud, spoke from the perspective of a European provider that has successfully competed for major public-sector contracts. The Commission’s recent €180 million tender, where OVHcloud was part of a winning consortium, demonstrates, she argued, that European providers can compete effectively when procurement frameworks are structured appropriately.

Earlier in the afternoon, Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General of CISPE, used a thinking-point slot to announce the launch of an auditable framework for sovereignty and resilience. He argued that the lack of a clear, verifiable definition has been a key barrier to market development. With such a framework in place, services that do not meet strict sovereignty criteria, such as immunity from extraterritorial jurisdiction, can instead be classified as “resilient,” enabling more transparent competition on commercial terms.

Anne Duboscq, Director of Public Affairs at OVHcloud in focus. 

Building Europe’s Ecosystem Together 

Forum Europe extends its sincere thanks to all partners, sponsors, speakers, and attendees for making the inaugural edition of Sovereign Tech Europe a success. Your insights, energy, and collaboration are what continue to push this agenda forward.

With several upcoming events, our portfolio of digital and technology policy conferences continues to grow.

For opportunities across our ecosystem: sam.ling@forum-europe.com

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Learn more about Forum Europe’s wider work here.