12 June 2026

At its 26th Annual General Assembly, the European Internet Forum welcomed Silvia Bartolini, Expert for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy in Executive Vice President Virkkunen's Cabinet, for a first-hand briefing on the technological sovereignty package adopted by the Commission the previous week. Speaking to EIF members gathered at the European Parliament, Ms Bartolini offered an early and detailed account of the package's political framing and its two core legislative acts: the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act.

Annual General Assembly 2026

 

Welcome Remarks

EIF Chair Marina Kaljurand MEP opened by welcoming members to the assembly and setting the context for the invited presentation. She noted the particular timeliness of the discussion, coming just days after the package's adoption, and described it as an opportunity to get a first-hand account of the Commission's intentions and the initial reception of the proposals. She introduced Bartolini, noting EVP Virkkunen's longstanding familiarity with the EIF from her time as an MEP, before handing over for the substantive briefing.

Guest of Honour

Silvia Bartolini opened by addressing a definitional question that she described as long overdue: what technological sovereignty actually means. The package, she explained, establishes that it is not synonymous with protectionism or closure. Europe's ambition is to manage global interdependencies actively and intelligently, sometimes by developing homegrown technologies, sometimes by partnering and diversifying, always with a clear understanding of where European strengths and vulnerabilities lie. Accompanying the main communication is a standalone Open Source Strategy, prompted by the observation that Europe spends an estimated €264 billion annually on non-EU proprietary digital products and services, while simultaneously hosting a thriving open source ecosystem of 3 million contributions and 500 for-profit companies whose potential remains largely untapped.

On the Chips Act 2.0, Ms Bartolini was clear that this is a recast, not a revolution: the three-pillar structure of the original act is preserved and reinforced rather than redesigned. Two changes of substance stand out. First, AI chips now account for a projected 70% of sector growth through 2030, yet Europe has no meaningful production capacity in this segment. The revised act sets the groundwork so that when European data centres, which the Commission aims to triple by 2030, next need to procure AI chips, European suppliers exist to meet that demand. Second, the resilience pillar draws directly from recent supply chain experience, which exposed how long it took to understand what was happening and how limited the Commission's legal basis was to act. The response is a business-to-business platform creating a digital twin of the semiconductor supply chain, enabling the Commission to monitor dependencies, identify concentration risks and anticipate crises before they materialise, rather than responding to them after the fact.

Turning to the Cloud and AI Development Act, Bartolini stressed that cloud and AI must be treated as a single policy object, not separated. The act rests on three pillars: research and innovation, where the goal is to create the legal basis for channelling funds from the next Multiannual Financial Framework and the European Competitiveness Fund, alongside provisions requiring member states to adopt national cloud and AI strategies to prevent fragmentation; capacity, where the tripling of data centre infrastructure is pursued through a system of acceleration zones that grant faster permitting and administrative pathways in exchange for commitments on sustainability, energy efficiency and contribution to clean energy capacity; and sovereignty, where the act introduces for the first time a tiered definition of sovereign cloud, ranging from the highest level for the most sensitive public data down through decreasing levels of stringency, with the Commission holding an arbitration role to ensure authorisations converge across member states rather than fragmenting again. Bartolini also flagged the EuroCloud initiative, a voluntary public sector cloud federation designed to help member states pool demand and access more cost-effective solutions, and joint procurement mechanisms through which the Commission can act on member states' behalf, pointing to the Commission's own recent cloud procurement as a proof of concept. She closed by acknowledging the financing challenge: the ambition of the package cannot be met from public budgets alone, and the Commission has begun consulting member states and the European Investment Bank on a European Tech Equity Facility to mobilise additional private capital, an exercise made more urgent by what she described as worrying signals regarding the digital envelope in the next MFF negotiations.

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