The European Union as the AI Continent: technological sovereignty and strategic infrastructure

by Paola Ritondò

With Communication COM(2025)165 of 9 April 2025, the European Commission has formally launched a new phase in the European Union’s digital strategy, setting out the ambitious – yet essential – goal of establishing Europe as the world’ first artificial intelligence continent. In a geopolitical context where technology has become a key domain of strategic competition among global powers, the European Union seeks to assert an autonomous path that combines technological leadership with the core values of the EU legal order.

This Communication marks a paradigm shift: from a primarily regulatory role to that of an active promoter of a European AI ecosystem. The dual goal is, on the one hand, to foster the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence across critical sectors of the economy, and on the other, to ensure that such a transformation takes place in full compliance with human dignity, democracy, and cultural diversity.

The European strategy is structured around five key pillars:

  • development of computing infrastructure, through the reinforcement of public facilities for the training and fine-tuning AI models;
  • secure, fair, and reliable access to data, by means of data governance framework that ensures both openness and protection;
  • promotion of AI deployment in strategic sectors of the European economy, with the aim of enhancing industrial competitiveness and achieving strategic autonomy;
  • strengthening skills and human capital, via advanced training programmes, talent attraction, and promotion of AI literacy;
  • safeguarding the digital single market, through harmonised legal frameworks designed to prevent regulatory fragmentation and foster trust in technological innovation.

At the heart of this strategic vision lies a structural awareness: AI leadership is not achievable without sufficient computational infrastructure. Currently, the European Union faces systemic dependency on data centres and cloud services hosted in third countries. This dependency not only undermines industrial competitiveness but also poses considerable risks to Europe’s economic and geopolitical security.

In response, the Commission is proposing the Cloud and AI Development Act, a legislative initiative designed to create the conditions necessary to attract large-scale investments in cloud and edge computing. The objective is clear: to triple Europe’s computing and storage capacity within five to seven years, thereby ensuring that by 2035, both businesses and public administrations can rely on European resources for the AI development and deployment.

The training and fine-tuning of AI models require large volumes of data and computational power, whereas inference can be conducted more efficiently in edge environments. As a result, data centres play not only a technical role but also strategic one, representing the intersection of computational needs, environmental sustainability goals, and technological sovereignty.

The Commission further notes that Europe’s current computing capacity is inadequate to support AI development – a shortfall previously highlighted in the 2024 Draghi Report, which identifies the enhancement of computing infrastructure as a foundational pillar of a comprehensive data-driven economy.

However, the path forward is not without challenges. Limited access to natural resources (energy, water, land), together with fragmented and often cumbersome permitting procedures across Member States, constitute a major deterrent to investment. Currently, the average time required to obtain permits for the construction of a data center is estimated at approximately 48 months.

The Cloud and AI Development Act sees to overcome these barriers by introducing streamlined procedures for projects that meet defined standards regarding energy and water efficiency, circular economy principles, and innovation. The Act aims both to accelerate the development of new infrastructure and to ensure consistency with the principles of the ecological transition.

At the same time, the Commission is advancing a strategic roadmap for the digitalisation of the energy sector, intended to support the sustainable integration of data centers into the electricity grid, while promoting energy efficiency and demand-side flexibility. From an environmental perspective, the forthcoming Water Resilience Strategy will focus on mitigating the water footprint of these facilities through the dry cooling systems, water reuse mechanisms, and consumption optimisation.

Within this framework, the Commission has launched a public consultation on the Cloud and AI Development Act, which opened on 9 April 2025 and will remain active until 4 June 2025. The Commission invites all stakeholders to actively participate to the legislative process, emphasising that the effective regulation of digital infrastructure requires broad and informed dialogue among institutions, industry actors, and civil society.