Extending President Emmanuel Macron’s metaphor of “carnivore” and “herbivore” nations – this time in the realm of tech – France’s digital minister Clara Chappaz denounced Europe’s reliance on US tech and called on the continent to hunt as a pack, on 14 April at an event on digital sovereignty at the Economy Ministry.
Chappaz’s remarks rank among the most forceful public statements by an EU tech minister since the new US administration launched an all-out offensive against EU tech regulation, threatening tariffs if the bloc enforced its laws – a move met largely with retreating silence from the European Commission.
In a world dominated by “predators,” Chappaz raised concerns about France and the EU’s dependence on US Big Tech, particularly in the cloud sector, where American giants Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services control up to 80% of the European market.
To safeguard itself from these and other US tech behemoths, she stressed that Europe must “work as a pack” on innovation, enforcement of its digital tech rulebook despite US threats and retaliate to the “idiotic” trade war launched by Trump, including -if necessary- by taxing US Big Tech digital services.
Doubling down on cloud sovereignty
Chappaz positioned herself against “sovereignty washing” by US cloud companies that partner with European firms in order to claim that their cloud services are sovereign – something members of the European Parliament are working on as well.
The French sovereign SecNumCloud cloud certification has clear criteria for determining whether a cloud offering is sovereign, she reminded, citing the ‘company capital holders’ requirement: no more than 24% of shares can be held by a single non-EU entity, or 39% by multiple non-EU entities – a threshold that US cloud providers cannot meet de facto.
A series of measures aiming at de-risking France and the EU from their US cloud dependencies were announced by Chappaz.
These measures include launching a call for project on sovereign cloud services funded under the France 2030 investment plan, creating an industry committee to encourage investment in sovereign solutions, and initiating a mission to map France’s technological dependencies – with the ultimate goal of addressing and reducing them.
Noting that, in the wake of the new Trump administration French cloud providers OVHcloud and Scaleway had never seen such an unprecedented surge in clients seeking secure alternatives to US Big Tech, she concluded that European companies have been “waking up to” the need to secure sovereign alternatives for their cloud services.