Tech sovereignty is as much about ambition as it is the right conditions
Thursday 4 June: This is a renewed commitment to strengthening Europe’s position in key digital and industrial technologies, was the reaction at Orgalim to the European Commission's Technology Sovereignty Package.
We believe the Commission is right to highlight Europe’s dependencies and to place greater emphasis on industrialisation and market uptake. At the same time, Orgalim believes that the concept of technological sovereignty must be approached with caution.
Europe’s competitiveness is built on openness, global partnerships and access to international supply chains: strengthening resilience should not come at the expense of these fundamentals.
The Chips Act 2 is a welcome step forward by moving beyond a purely supply-side approach and placing stronger emphasis on downstream industrial demand and ecosystem-building. It should be noted that for it to grow, demand needs ambitious regulatory simplification conducive of investments in industrial AI, data centers, industrial data and advanced manufacturing. Europe needs leading-edge chips. However, policy makers should understand the meaning of 'advanced' more broadly: there is more to it than just sub-2nm logic chips. Neuromorphic chips, photonics, quantum chips, and many other innovations are already present in Europe and need upscaling to enable the next generation of computing. Launching top-down semiconductors foundry projects should be approached with particular caution to avoid focusing on types of chips that are not driven by industrial demand and that may end up requiring disproportionate or even permanent subsidies.
Strengthening Europe’s semiconductor ecosystem, in particular, requires not only public support but also globally competitive framework conditions, including energy costs, access to capital and regulatory simplification. Competitive energy prices can be achieved via an ambitious reduction of national taxes and levies on electricity prices.
Technological leadership will ultimately depend on our ability to create globally competitive conditions for Europe. That requires genuine ambition.
The Strategic Roadmap for AI and digitalisation of the energy sector part of the Technology Sovereignty Package should recognise the dual dynamics at play: while the digitalisation of Europe’s energy infrastructure is a key lever to reduce overall energy consumption through smart grids, automation and advanced energy management systems, the rapid expansion of data centres is simultaneously driving significant increases in electricity demand. This highlights the need for a systemic approach that both maximises efficiency gains and manages rising consumption. Data centres and digital infrastructure should be incentivised to deploy state‑of‑the‑art energy‑efficient technologies and to operate as active participants in the energy system, notably through demand-side flexibility and waste heat recovery.
The Cloud and AI Development Act rightly acknowledges the importance of boosting development and deployment of data centres and physical AI in Europe. Both are important elements of an innovative and competitive industrial ecosystems.
While details need to be assessed, Orgalim, representing chips suppliers (from equipment to back end and packaging), downstream industrial chip users, as well as industrial users of cloud, industrial AI developers and integrators and manufacturers of data centre equipment is ready to engage with the EU institutions to make this new package work in practice.