Washington’s decision last week to restrict foreign nationals’ access to Anthropic’s latest AI model was a major focus at VivaTech, Europe’s largest technology conference, which this year attracted an estimated 180,000 attendees.The conference opened with a joint call to action from the French and German economy and digital ministers who expressed concern about the Continent’s reliance on U.S.-controlled technologies, arguing that Europe must move quickly to build genuine technological sovereignty.
The declaration announced the relaunch of the “Franco-German Forum for the Future.” The platform aims to link up the two countries’ private and public-sector tech efforts, including tallying up local alternatives to foreign digital services and creating an “evaluation framework for Europe’s critical digital dependencies.”
“The suspension of access to the most advanced models makes one thing clear to everyone,” said Germany’s Federal Minister for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization, Karsten Wildberger. “This is no longer an access debate; rules can change overnight, and sovereignty means we can still act if things like that happen,” he said.
And act they did. Several of the Continent’s largest corporations and governments announced they were dropping contracts with U.S. tech providers and shifting that business to European firms — one of a wave of new initiatives unveiled at the conference aimed at helping Europe catch up in the AI race.
At a press conference at VivaTech, LVMH, the global luxury brand, announced that it would be switching its cloud service to Scaleway. “Maintaining control over our data and technologies across all our markets is both a strategic priority and a major requirement for LVMH and its Maisons,” Franck Le Moal, Group CIO, LVMH, said in a statement.
Other companies, including a French newspaper, an insurance company, and a major French hospital, also made the switch.
“The battle of the cloud is not lost,” Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas said in an interview with The Innovator at VivaTech. Today, U.S. providers dominate the European market, but Scaleway’s pitch is starting to really resonate, he says. “Our positioning is that with us your data is safe from extraterritorial demands and you will have access to the cloud no matter what happens.”
Meanwhile, France’s domestic intelligence service said it will ditch AI data tools from the U.S. tech company Palantir in favor of a domestic provider to avoid “strategic dependency,” the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said in a social media post. “We must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere,” Lecornu posted on social media. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”
Lecornu’s office said the French DGSI intelligence agency would replace Palantir’s tools with those from the French firm ChapsVision, although press reports indicated that since the U.S. company’s long-term contract was renewed in 2025, the process is likely to take several years.
ChapsVision’s technology, which collects, prepares, and analyzes data, has reportedly also been selected by Germany’s BfV internal security service. ChapsVision sells tools that process sensitive data for governments and companies, where questions over privacy, civil liberties, and accountability are acute. It is pitching ArgonOS as a European platform for intelligence and decision-making. The company has positioned itself as an alternative to U.S.-based Palantir Technologies, which has faced criticism from rights groups and activists over work in areas including immigration, health, and security, raising concerns about surveillance, use of personal data, and reliance on a politically divisive contractor.
DIV Protocol, which is building a European suite of sovereign, encrypted, and auditable work tools pitched as an alternative to Google Drive and Microsoft 365, perfectly captured the zeitgeist at VivaTech. It strategically placed advertisements picturing Uncle Sam with the slogan “Do you feel like you are being observed?” in the bathrooms at the conference directly across from toilet seats. “Not with us,” the ad goes on to say.
What’s Behind the Tech Lash
Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral, Europe’s emerging AI champion, aptly captured why the stakes are so high: “AI is, and will increasingly be, the defining source of leverage and power in the world,” he said in a blog post.
Mensch, a speaker at VivaTech, was invited to give a presentation at the G7 meeting in Europe this week. In his blog post, Mensch said he “shared some reflection of how critical it is to ensure this technology is diffused and decentralized across the world.”
That’s a view shared by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who participated in the G7 meeting and was also a speaker at VivaTech. While on stage at the tech conference, Modi said: “Technology can lead to progress only when it is democratized.”
Modi and Mensch separately had a one-on-one meeting in Paris on Thursday and discussed the critical importance of digital autonomy and sovereign AI capabilities for both India and the European Union. The ANI, an Indian wire service, quoted Mensch as saying how important it is “for every country, for the European Union, for India, to actually own and control the stack of artificial intelligence – from the energy supply all the way to the creation of what we call tokens and the creation and distribution of this technology to the people.”
Mensch delivered the same message at this week’s G7 meeting. “If the consensus points toward sharing the technology with trusted partners, it should not distract European stakeholders from a parallel imperative: investing in our own homegrown AI value chain, from electricity to applications,” he said in a blog post about his G7 contribution. “Only by building that full stack can we ensure the value this technology creates feeds back into long-term European growth engaging the flywheel of reinvestment in R&D that keeps us innovating.”
Europe is not entirely absent from the AI tech stack. ASML dominates in lithography, the Netherlands’ ASM International holds roughly 55% of the atomic layer deposition market, a critical component in modern transistors. Austria’s EV Group commands 56% of the wafer bonding segment. Germany contributes through Siemens EDA (around 13% of chip design software), Carl Zeiss (optics inside ASML machines), and Linde (industrial gases). France’s Air Liquide is a significant supplier of the specialty gases that semiconductor fabs consume in enormous quantities, notes a recent report by The Future Society entitled “Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Building True EU Frontier AI Sovereignty.”
But the report stresses that Europe is largely in a state of structural dependence: frontier AI models are almost exclusively produced in the U.S. and China, and Europe’s super computing capacity is way behind, handicapping the Continent’s ability to develop or even just use frontier AI models at scale.
Following the call to action in the 2024 Draghi report, the European Commission has launched no fewer than 92 AI initiatives spanning compute infrastructure, data governance, regulatory reform, research funding, and skills.
What Europe needs, the authors of The Future Society report argue, is not a list of initiatives but a coherent view of the stack: a clear understanding of which layers require European control for sovereignty to be meaningful, which can safely be sourced externally, and which represent the leverage points where targeted investment generates outsized returns.
One of those leverage points may lie in industry.While the first wave of AI was dominated by consumer platforms, the next is moving into factories, supply chains and critical infrastructure. Rebuilding Industry With AI: Europe’s Next Advantage? was the topic of a panel moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief. (See the photo). Speakers included Jens Holtinger, CTO of the Volvo Group, Cedrik Neike, CTO at Siemens, Sebastian Steinhaeuser, COO of SAP and Marjorie Janiewicz, Chief Revenue Officer at Mistral.
What a Difference a Year Makes
At GTC Paris — held alongside VivaTech, Europe’s largest tech event last June — Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang pitched “sovereign” AI infrastructure to great applause. The proposed new data centers offering essential compute power within national borders will be powered by Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia software stacks (CUDA), and Nvidia-certified cloud partners — all of which remain under American corporate and legal control.
The Huang roadshow was, in many ways, a live illustration of the Trojan Horse thesis of the Future Society’s report. It outlines how Europe’s most consequential AI dependencies may not arrive through coercion, but as gifts: infrastructure investments, model access agreements, or technology partnerships that appear beneficial in the short run but quietly erode Europe’s capacity for self-determination.
Now these types of agreements with U.S. tech providers are increasingly being seen as sovereignty washing.
The current emphasis is on supporting local companies and talent like Mistral; AMI Labs, a Paris-based artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Yann LeCun, the former Chief AI Scientist at Meta; ASML, which makes ultraviolet lithography machines indispensable to advanced chipmaking; and European cloud companies OVHcloud and Scaleway.
During a VivaTech session, Anne Le Hénanff, the French Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, noted that a French initiative launched in 2023 to get large companies to buy from French tech companies has led to over €2 billion in contracts. “Our ambition must extend beyond borders,” she said. “Europe must stand united.”
That’s a responsibility that European cloud provider Scaleway is taking seriously. Along with courting European organizations to switch to its local cloud offerings during VivaTech, Scaleway, VSORA, a fabless European developer of ultra-high-performance AI solutions founded in Paris in 2015, and ZML, a developer of an open-source, hardware-agnostic AI inference stack, signed a strategic partnership aimed at accelerating the development and deployment in Europe of next-generation AI inference chips — described as “the first concrete link in a sovereign European value chain in artificial intelligence: from silicon design to operation within cloud infrastructure.”
Scaleway is committing to deploying the first servers to be produced by VSORA and to validating the architecture in production to help European players strengthen their technological-independence strategy, says Lucas, Scaleway’s CEO. “We all have to take responsibility,” he said.
During the European Tech Sovereignty Summit, a side event to VivaTech held at the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs on June 16, Wildberger, Germany’s Federal Minister for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization, stressed that European governments must also play a role in helping Europe’s tech companies scale by becoming early customers.
“It is time to turn sovereignty into product,” said Wildberger. “Let’s build. We have what it takes.”
