The discussion regarding European digital sovereignty has entered a new phase. While the debate six months ago was dominated by the desire simply to become independent of American hyperscalers, that initial ambition has since been superseded. The foundations for a distinct European data sovereignty are already being laid. According to Kurt Jonckheer, CEO of Klarrio, we have now arrived at an era where sovereignty can truly take shape.
This shift presents a unique opportunity to make a massive technological leap forward. The term “leapfrog” fits well here, describing a process where a stage of development is entirely bypassed to immediately secure a leading position. Compare this to what happened earlier in parts of Africa during the mobile revolution: the entire generation of landlines and dial-up connections was simply skipped by investing directly in mobile networks. In no time at all, people had smartphones without ever having owned a landline.
The debate around sovereignty presents a similar “leapfrog” opportunity for European companies; a chance to leave complex legacy systems behind and transition to modern data infrastructure.
The gap between theory and the daily workplace
Jonckheer points out that this transition will not happen automatically. A persistent and painful pattern is emerging within many organizations currently seeking to switch to a sovereign European cloud. Significant investments are being made to build a new platform based on open source and modern technologies. While the expectation is that this platform will transform the organization, reality often proves more challenging due to a deep-seated divide within the workforce. The majority of staff continue to work daily in familiar, traditional environments using legacy business applications, while only a small, highly isolated team is actually engaged in the new technical activities.
These two groups can potentially clash. The innovative team works with radically different tools, new processes, and emerging methods. As a result, they increasingly operate like an island within the company. These early adopters of the new technology may quickly come to view the rest of the organization as conservative and slow. At the same time, employees who rely on traditional approaches may feel as though they are being left behind.
Failures due to good intentions
The risk here is that ambitious migration projects can stall. After an intensive development phase, a modern platform is in place, but the existing business applications have not yet evolved alongside it. Running these applications on the new system requires a thorough restructuring or refactoring of the code. It is precisely this complex process that often lacks the necessary budget and priority, meaning that, in practice, hardly any applications actually run on the new foundation.
At the European policy level, the strategies for enforcing digital autonomy are now clearly visible and have been translated into legislation. This begins with the Chips Act 2.0, aimed at building up domestic chip production, and the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), which sets out strict guidelines for critical AI. These measures are supported by an investment framework with allocated funds and a widely backed EU open-source strategy designed to embed transparent technology within Europe.
These relatively recent steps provide a solid framework. However, there is a significant blind spot. Alternatives to the foundational infrastructure layer are currently being built at a rapid pace, but the actual services and applications intended to run on top of them are conspicuously absent. Just as IT professionals had to get certified en masse ten years ago to manage US cloud services, the new sovereign cloud requires an entirely new set of skills and an exponentially expanded ecosystem of local providers.
Rijkswaterstaat as a blueprint for coordinated modernization
Jonckheer illustrates what this technological leap might and should look like in the complex reality of actual operations by citing the example of Rijkswaterstaat. This government agency manages vital infrastructure such as bridges, locks, and tunnels, many of which date back to the 1960s and 1970s. Over the decades, the management of this critical infrastructure has become highly fragmented, split into rigidly isolated silos. For instance, the tunnels in Zeeland and the locks of the Oosterschelde are largely managed on a regional, autonomous basis, complete with their own separate software systems and independent spare-parts supply chains.
In situations like these, Jonckheer strongly advocates for an overarching vision. Rijkswaterstaat needs to look beyond the mere reactive replacement of rusted sensors or physical hardware. True modernization, the real leapfrogging, lies in intelligently unlocking all these decentralized data sources via a cloud-native, open-source, and distributed application layer.
By standardizing all data nationwide, operators can gain a holistic overview of the entire national infrastructure through a single, centralized, and sovereign platform. This holistic view will even enable locks and bridges to communicate autonomously with one another in the near future. Bridge operation schedules can then be continuously adjusted based on real-time traffic volumes, for both waterways and roads, rather than adhering to predefined, static time slots.
The need for a consortium
Successfully realizing such highly complex ambitions requires deep collaboration that transcends the boundaries of individual companies. No single party possesses the knowledge to build this in isolation. Rijkswaterstaat collaborates with various specialized suppliers that have been providing systems for the complex telemetry of heavy infrastructure for decades. Jonckheer aims for just such a powerful consortium-based approach to jointly present a proposal rooted in European sovereignty; one that elevates the entire EU ecosystem to a higher level.
He observes, however, that the dialogue on this matter is still in its infancy. “If no one raises this issue, I don’t see it emerging spontaneously on its own,” states Jonckheer. His call is therefore directed at all stakeholders in the sovereignty debate: stop merely migrating bare server infrastructure and insist that the entire service and application landscape be included as an integral part of the process.
Focus on integration instead of core technology
Calls to build this type of sovereign application layer are often met with cynicism. There is a reflexive assumption that Europe lacks the necessary technological talent and is therefore forever doomed to rely on American data platforms like Databricks or Snowflake. Jonckheer dispels this persistent myth by pointing to the origins of such platforms; although they are now massive companies, both started out, relatively recently, with only very small teams.
Databricks had a modest beginning. It started with a small group of PhD students at the University of California, Berkeley, who were working on solutions for parallel data processing. When they opened their first commercial office in San Francisco five years later, the team was still small. The absolute core of the engine behind Databricks, Spark, was also originally written by a small group of students. What Databricks offers today stems from building further upon that original Spark.
An almost identical pattern is evident at Snowflake, where a handful of former Oracle employees from Europe laid the groundwork in the early years. When the data platform proved exceptionally effective for analytics workloads, the company rapidly expanded into a massive enterprise. A notable detail here is that Snowflake’s original founders are European, yet they chose the United States due to the ecosystem and access to capital.
The lesson to be drawn from both examples is that investing in something that starts small can genuinely enable Europe to produce major players in the data sector. “The intellect and skills are available in Europe,” Jonckheer emphasizes. It really comes down to a lack of local venture capital and a fundamental shortage of business incentives.
From stifling over-regulation to a business incentive
European policymakers often fixate on the astronomical, multi-billion-dollar valuations of Silicon Valley tech companies, mistakenly using them as a benchmark for European viability. While politicians hesitate, European initiatives founder on the rocks of protectionism and unworkable over-regulation. Gaia-X, the ambitious cloud project launched in 2019, stalled almost immediately due to national self-interest. The bitter outcome was not technological collaboration, but the creation of an impenetrable thicket of new compliance regulations.
To turn the tide, Europe urgently needs a powerful business incentive. Commercial enterprises immediately lose interest the moment it becomes clear that a project will merely result in additional administrative burdens rather than financial gain. As long as AI adoption and training in Europe remain dependent on US platforms, where budgets evaporate due to opaque token pricing before implementation has even properly begun, structural innovation on home soil will remain impossible.
Leaping beyond outdated structures
This brings us to the pitfall facing the broader European data transition. As a continent, we must have the courage to make the leap to entirely new architectural models and ecosystems, rather than propping up outdated structures with subsidies. From a technical standpoint, building a robust European alternative for large-scale data processing locally is entirely feasible. What is currently missing, however, are the deep technological integrations and the political and financial conditions needed to breathe life into this new ecosystem.
The need to establish a sovereign European cloud environment, including applications and AI, has never been greater. The technology is ready, and the talent is available right here on our own continent. It’s now time to actually take the leap.
Tip: The call for fundamental software skills is getting louder and louder