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Simply how harmful it’s when ideological pursuits conflict with technological energy has change into clear with the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Inside a really brief house of time, Trump not solely shocked the general public with numerous controversial presidential decrees, but in addition managed to make tech giants equivalent to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta (supposedly) placed on a courageous face.

Greater than 80% are imports

This places Europe specifically in danger, as a result of in accordance with Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness from September 2024, greater than 80% of digital applied sciences and infrastructures in Europe are imported. The dependencies relate primarily to the US and China in addition to just a few tech corporations from these nations. According to studies by the Synergy Group, US suppliers equivalent to Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate virtually 70% of the European cloud computing market. The biggest European supplier solely has a market share of two%. As well as, round 70% of the muse fashions for synthetic intelligence (AI) used worldwide come from the USA, whereas China controls round 90 p.c of world refinery capacities for uncommon earths.

Though these dependencies are well-known, the sporadic countermeasures taken to date are primarily because of the initiative of particular person nations. Examples embody initiatives such because the openDesk workplace answer developed by the Middle for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration (ZenDiS) in Germany. As well as, there have to date been hardly any efforts to map the complete stack with European services. Growing spending on analysis and improvement in Europe and innovation efforts haven’t been geared in the direction of an overarching imaginative and prescient that leverages synergies or amplifies influence.