Europe Can Build All the Chip Fabs It Wants. It Still Won't Be Sovereign.

Forrester has published its first Global Sovereignty Forecast, and the verdict for Europe is bleak: all the semiconductor subsidies and sovereignty rhetoric in the world won't meaningfully reduce the continent's dependence on American cloud and software platforms. Not by 2030, anyway.

The report introduces a Tech Sovereignty Index covering AI investment, cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, datacentre capacity, software, and technical talent. At the top sit China and the US, scoring 82 and 79 percent respectively. Everyone else is an also-ran.

Europe's major economies barely register movement across the forecast window. Germany and Spain nudge from 34 to 36 percent. France goes from 33 to 35. The UK scrapes from 30 to 32. Italy brings up the rear at 27 percent today, rising to a barely-inspiring 29 percent by 2030. These are not the numbers of a continent asserting technological independence.

Semiconductors are the one area where Forrester sees genuine momentum. Government money is flowing into domestic chip production, and manufacturing scores are expected to climb in several countries. But more fabs is not the same as a coherent tech stack. Europe designs roughly 1 percent of the world's chips and has nothing resembling a homegrown Nvidia or Qualcomm. Meanwhile, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud collectively hold around 65 percent of the European cloud market. High energy costs and slow planning processes aren't helping datacentre expansion either.

The European Chips Act set an ambitious target of producing 20 percent of global semiconductors by 2030. Forrester's forecast puts the likely reality at 11.3 percent, partly because the rest of the world isn't standing still while Brussels draws up policy documents.

The report also takes a sceptical view of what the hyperscalers are marketing as "sovereign cloud." AWS, Microsoft, and Google have all launched European cloud products with local governance and operational separation. Forrester's position is straightforward: these are still subsidiaries of American corporations. The servers may be on European soil, but the ownership structure isn't.

The firm's advice to most countries is to stop chasing the impossible and start managing the inevitable. Complete tech self-sufficiency isn't a realistic goal for most nations. Strategic alliances, open technologies, and targeted investment in genuine weak points are more useful than grand declarations of independence that don't hold up to scrutiny.

Principal analyst Dario Maisto put it plainly: "To compete in the AI era, nations must understand their strategic dependencies and build durable partnerships that safeguard their data, infrastructure, and long-term autonomy."

Building fabs is the easy part, relatively speaking. Constructing an entire sovereign technology stack, from chips through to software and cloud, is a different order of problem entirely. Europe hasn't really started on that one yet.