European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attends a press conference after a European Union leaders’ special summit to discuss Ukraine and European defense, in Brussels, Belgium March 6, 2025.
Stephanie Lecocq | Reuters
Airbus and over 90 other European companies and lobby groups have called on the European Commission to create a sovereign infrastructure fund to boost public investment and bolster the region’s autonomy in the tech sector.
In a March 14 letter addressed to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen, the signatories — which include Dassault Systemes, French cloud services supplier OVHcloud and the European Startup Network — stressed the need for Europe’s technological self-reliance as it confronts a “stark reality” following “developments in U.S./EU relations.”
“Building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now a recognised urgent imperative across Europe,” the letter said. It stressed that Europe is now in a “laggard position” in the digital space — having been significantly outpaced by the U.S. and China — and will have a near-complete reliance on non-European technologies in less than three years at the current rate.
“Europe needs to recover the initiative, and become more technologically independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure: from logical Infrastructure — applications, platforms, media, AI frameworks and models — to physical Infrastructure — chips, computing, storage and connectivity,” the letter says, warning that “Europe’s current multiple dependencies create security and reliability risks, compromise our sovereignty and hurt our growth.”
Chief among the letter’s requests for a “pragmatic industrial policy strategy” is the need for Europe to inject a formal requirement for the public sector to “Buy European” as well as incentivize the private sector to steer toward similar purchases — with an aim “not to exclude non-European players, but to create space where European suppliers can legitimately compete (and justify investment).”
The letter also calls for the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund for public investments in tech, particularly in “capital-intensive” projects such as quantum and chips, requesting “significant” funds either allocated or underwritten by the European Investment Bank and by national public funding bodies.
Europe is striving to gain momentum in the tech sector, where executives and venture capitalists have been calling for additional investment and laxer regulation to rejuvenate growth — particularly in the booming AI space.
Amid aggressive U.S. protectionist policies and tariff impositions, the European Union has increasingly sought to safeguard growth and bolster its autonomy, earlier this month proposing fiscal measures that could mobilize nearly 800 billion euros ($872 billion) toward the region’s higher defense spend.
This developing story is being updated.