Overview
- German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron convened a Berlin summit to push a Europe‑first digital agenda with EU leaders, digital ministers and CEOs from firms including Mistral and SAP.
- The European Commission launched twin investigations into Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to determine whether they should be designated cloud gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act.
- Commission officials said a proposal to roll back elements of the EU’s AI and data‑protection rules will be presented later this week to bolster competitiveness and scale adoption.
- Leaders prioritized building sovereign cloud capacity and resilient supply chains, citing data showing Europe’s data‑centre power trails the United States and China by wide margins (16 GW vs 48 GW and 38 GW).
- Announcements and signals from the summit included French‑German backing for tougher oversight of dominant cloud providers and a Mistral–SAP tie‑up billed as a sovereign AI stack, with officials stressing the push is about safeguarding European sovereignty rather than confronting the United States or China.