Overview
- Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron headlined a Berlin gathering of roughly 900–1,000 participants to cut reliance on U.S. and Chinese tech and build European capabilities.
- Organizers announced 18 new AI partnerships worth about €1 billion via the EU AI Champions Initiative, including collaborations such as SAP–Mistral and SAP–Bleu, with additional projects spanning sectors like insurance and defense tech.
- Germany and France signaled the state will act as an anchor customer, expand open‑source tools in administrations (openDesk and La Suite), and align procurement criteria to favor sovereign European solutions.
- Brussels will present a “digital omnibus” to consolidate and simplify overlapping digital rules, with EU officials also weighing tougher competition oversight for dominant cloud providers; civil‑society groups warn against diluting data‑protection and rights.
- Infrastructure plans were spotlighted, including the Schwarz‑Gruppe’s €11 billion data‑center project in Lübbenau and the EU’s KI gigafactory drive, as leaders framed sovereignty as a competitiveness, security and defense priority.