Hardware Gains Fail to Solve Europe's Software Dependency

Brussels may spend billions on semiconductor manufacturing to achieve technological independence, but these efforts are unlikely to break the region's reliance on American software and cloud providers, as The Register reported, citing Forrester.

In its first Global Sovereignty Forecast, Forrester notes that the United States and China are the clear leaders in tech sovereignty, scoring 79 percent and 82 percent, respectively. In contrast, Europe's largest economies show minimal growth in their sovereignty scores between now and 2030: Germany and Spain rise to 36 percent, France to 35 percent, the UK to 32 percent, and Italy to 29 percent.

While the European Chips Act aims for the bloc to produce 20 percent of the world's semiconductors by 2030, Forrester expects Europe to reach only 11.3 percent. Furthermore, the analyst argues that increasing the number of fabs does not equal independence, as Europe designs only about 1 percent of global chips and lacks domestic equivalents to Qualcomm or Nvidia.

The dependency extends to the cloud layer, where Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS control approximately 65 percent of the European market. Forrester is unconvinced by the "sovereign cloud" offerings from these US hyperscalers, noting that while datacenters may be located in Europe, ultimate ownership remains with the US parent companies.

Forrester suggests that nations should stop chasing complete self-sufficiency and instead focus on managing unavoidable dependencies through selective investment.