Sovereignty and European competitiveness: A partnership-led approach to AI growth

In our conversations with business and policy leaders across Europe, we have listened closely to their concerns about sovereignty and European competitiveness. It is clear that they often find themselves caught in a paradox that Europe must choose between autonomy and growth. At Google Cloud, we believe that this is a false choice, and a premise that we challenge. Our position is rooted in partnership, choice, and security.

We think that true sovereignty isn’t about isolation; it’s about having the power of choice. We combine cutting-edge AI capabilities with a flexible infrastructure built to align with Europe’s digital sovereignty needs. This approach ensures our customers drive growth without sacrificing control, in accordance with European standards and providing robust safeguards against external interference. 

The European Union is encouraging business and organizations to embrace AI, with a potential €1.2 trillion in AI-driven GDP growth over the next decade. However, this hinges on access to best in class AI and modern cloud solutions. Recent research showed that if European industry is constrained by a lack of access to the most advanced AI capabilities, that trillion-euro opportunity collapses by two-thirds to only €400 billion.   

Three critical requirements for Europe’s AI future stand out:

Choice as a catalyst for economic growth: European organizations deserve the best solutions without the risk of being locked into proprietary systems. We’ve championed a multicloud approach from the start, ensuring businesses have the freedom to select and combine providers to meet their unique needs.

Interoperability: A healthy ecosystem depends on developers that can build freely based on open platforms, and 75% of Europe’s AI value creation potential will be at the application and services layer. We support European technology leaders like ASML and Mistral, who bring their own technologies to our stack. We give European developers flexibility in how they build their solutions by offering a wide range of third-party models along with Gemma, our open model built with the same technology that powers our Gemini models. This variety ensures that interoperability is the ultimate guarantee of sovereign choice.

Security and resilience: With the unprecedented speed of AI adoption, cybersecurity and resilience play an increasingly critical role. To bolster our collective digital resilience, we focus on speed, interoperability, and control. We provide different levels of control and assurance according to the specific data at stake in accordance with our customers’ preferences, including our partnership with S3NS in France (achieving SecNumCloud 3.2, the highest security certification for cloud service providers in France), our Google Cloud Air-Gapped and Google Cloud Dedicated solutions for the defense sector, our recent infrastructure investments in Belgium, Germany, and through our 13 cloud regions in Europe. 

At every level, our technology is secure by default and underpinned by commitments to our customers about the lengths we will go to in order to help enable continuity of service in extreme circumstances. 

The bottom line: There should be no conflict between Europe’s digital sovereignty and its economic competitiveness. We consider this a false choice, championing the view that growth, security, and control can and should go hand in hand. 

Our core mission is to provide the concrete tools necessary to transform this shared ambition into reality, delivering across these three critical requirements. To that end, Google Cloud is focused on delivering this vision by working alongside European partners like Thales, TIM, Schwarz, Proximus, and many local champions across the continent. Together, we are committed to supporting a digital future defined by potent collaboration, innovation, and shared European success.

To learn more about Google Cloud’s support for sovereignty and competitiveness, visit our website or reach out to our digital sovereignty experts.