Brussels finally names the 80% problem
On 3 June 2026, the European Commission adopted its most ambitious Tech Sovereignty package yet. For the first time, an official Commission page says it out loud: the EU depends on non-EU providers for over 80% of its key digital products, services, infrastructure and intellectual property — a number the Commission itself cites from a 2022 CERRE report.
For anyone reading along at OurSoftware.eu, that number is not a surprise. What is new: policy is no longer trailing the builders — it's catching up to what European vendors have been shipping for years.
What's in the package?
Announced by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in line with the State of the Union 2025, the package has four headline components:
- Chips Act 2.0 — strengthens Europe's semiconductor ecosystem from R&D to manufacturing capacity, building on champions like ASML.
- Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) — aims to triple Europe's cloud and AI capacity and tie public procurement to sovereign infrastructure.
- EU Open Source Strategy — puts open source at the centre of Europe's digital strategy, with full-lifecycle funding from R&D to market uptake.
- Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy — couples the energy transition to European digital infrastructure.
The full Commission communication is public.
The more interesting angle: the alternatives already exist
Most policy commentary focuses on what's still to come. That's understandable — Chips Act 2.0 won't be law until 2027, CADA will take years — but it misses the bigger point: for nearly every layer of the stack, a European vendor is already shipping today. The bottleneck isn't supply. It's procurement.
Walk through the OurSoftware.eu directory and you can swap out almost every layer:
- Cloud & hosting — OVHcloud, Scaleway, Hetzner, IONOS. See the full list of AWS alternatives.
- Productivity & office — Nextcloud, Open-Xchange, OpenProject, XWiki. Browse Google Workspace alternatives.
- Email & communications — Proton, Tuta.
- AI — Mistral AI leading a growing pack of OpenAI alternatives.
- Semiconductors — ASML as the anchor of Europe's chip ambition.
Browse the full category index, the interactive map, or filter the directory by country.
The real work: procurement, not legislation
Legislation creates room. Purchase orders create markets. Three recent stories show what that looks like in practice — and how hard it actually is:
- The University of Groningen wants out of Big Tech by 2030 — and is discovering US vendors hidden in every corner of the stack.
- The City of Amsterdam picked KPN as its sovereign cloud partner — a signal that procurement is starting to pick up the mandate.
- The Euro-Office coalition proved European players can ship a full, integrated productivity suite together.
The Tech Sovereignty package gives these decisions political cover. But without binding EU-preference quotas in public procurement — something CADA still stops short of — it stays at the level of good intentions.
What to watch next
- Digital Omnibus — simplification of existing rules (DSA, DMA, AI Act) without watering them down.
- AI Factories — European AI compute capacity for startups and researchers.
- The 2026 State of the Digital Decade report shows where Europe is still behind on its 2030 targets.
What you can do
Policy moves slowly. Your next procurement decision doesn't have to. Explore the directory, browse categories, or suggest a European vendor we haven't covered yet. Want a fortnightly briefing? Subscribe to the newsletter.
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