The French government said this year that it would replace Zoom and other American videoconference software with a French-developed alternative. Germany is building a homegrown platform for artificial intelligence. Companies in both countries are teaming up to build A.I. chips to rival those of the United States and China.<\/p>\n
These are modest steps in Europe\u2019s high-stakes race to catch up to America and China in the global sprint for digital independence. Without it, Europe\u2019s political and business leaders worry, they will be vulnerable to sudden losses of access to critical technologies, as after President Trump\u2019s recent decision to cut off foreigners from some of Anthropic\u2019s latest artificial intelligence models<\/a>. They will also miss out on revenues from a booming industry.<\/p>\n Yet interviews with industry leaders, public officials, entrepreneurs and economists suggest there is currently little question about whether Europe can wean itself off tech dependence anytime soon.<\/p>\n It cannot.<\/p>\n Instead, political and business leaders across the continent are wrestling with a more limited, but still daunting, question. If full independence is impossible, where should Europe focus its digital efforts, in pursuit of at least partial autonomy?<\/p>\n \u201cOne hundred percent autonomy in digital services is not at this stage something that is feasible,\u201d said Anne Le H\u00e9nanff, France\u2019s minister for artificial intelligence and digital affairs. \u201cWe just need to decide what we don\u2019t want to be dependent on.\u201d<\/p>\n Europe\u2019s consumers and businesses rely heavily on American and Chinese imports for their digital lives, including social media, national security systems and artificial intelligence. They store data with American companies, like Amazon, despite European concerns over the comparative laxness of American data protection rules. European-based multinational companies, like Mercedes-Benz, hone some of their most important new technology in Chinese labs.<\/p>\n Europe has one homegrown large language model, Mistral A.I., a three-year-old start-up that is France\u2019s national champion in artificial intelligence and is now valued at $14 billion. Mistral\u2019s three founders worked for Google and Meta before starting the company.<\/p>\n Technology executives acknowledge that France does not yet have a financing culture, like that of Silicon Valley, to incubate promising start-ups. In France and across much of Europe, business leaders complain that companies must move to America to scale up.<\/p>\n Continental leaders have begun to call that reliance dangerous, strategically and economically, as Washington and Beijing more boldly wield raw power to bend other countries to their will. They say it leaves them more vulnerable to cyberattacks, and to economic and diplomatic pressure by powerful governments that may not share Europe\u2019s democratic values.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need nothing more and nothing less than technological sovereignty in Europe, and therefore also in Germany, at least wherever it is attainable,\u201d Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said last fall. Europe\u2019s technological dependencies, he warned, were \u201cbeing exploited for power politics.\u201d<\/p>\n Last week, the Netherlands announced plans<\/a> to create government-controlled data centers to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of foreign companies.<\/p>\n Last month, France\u2019s prime minister, S\u00e9bastien Lecornu, said his country\u2019s domestic intelligence service would stop using A.I. data tools from Palantir, an American tech company, in favor of those from a French company, ChapsVision.<\/p>\n \u201cJust as we would not agree to transfer our national archives to California, we must use our own A.I. tools,\u201d Mr. Lecornu said in a video posted on social media.<\/a><\/p>\n Relying on foreign technology can be dangerous for the private sector, too. Many European companies depend on Chinese products for data storage and cannot guarantee that their data will not be shared with Chinese intelligence, said Sebastian Kurz, a former chancellor of Austria. He is now the president of Dream, a company that sells A.I. security systems that exist entirely within one country to Western clients, including governments.<\/p>\n That dependence, Mr. Kurz said in an interview, is problematic if it affects \u201csensitive data in sectors like health care, where people feel a need that their data is protected.\u201d<\/p>\n Governments across Europe are spending billions of euros to try to shake those dependencies for themselves and their companies \u2014 at least in select areas.<\/p>\n The French government has committed to spending roughly $5.3 billion to buy digital tools from French companies.<\/p>\n The German government plans to spend more than $20 billion<\/a> over the next several years in six key tech sectors<\/a>, including artificial intelligence and biotechnology. It has contracted with the German companies Deutsche Telekom and SAP to build a government A.I. platform<\/a> that can be entirely disconnected from rivals like China and America.<\/p>\n A German government agency for innovation has started a fund worth roughly $140 million to catalyze investment in European start-up companies in areas like A.I. At a conference the agency sponsored this spring, officials said they were hoping less to fully supplant American and Chinese tech companies than to work with them \u2014 and to become indispensable in their operations.<\/p>\n Dorothee B\u00e4r, Germany\u2019s federal minister for research, technology and space, noted in an interview at the conference that German start-ups had played a role<\/a> in the launch of NASA\u2019s Artemis II rocket.<\/p>\n \u201cThese mutual dependencies are also important, and the Americans in particular see that we have our own strengths,\u201d Ms. B\u00e4r said. America in the Trump era, she added, \u201creacts exclusively to strength.\u201d<\/p>\n German tech leaders are particularly enthusiastic about their chances of building on the country\u2019s legacy strength, manufacturing, to pioneer exportable high-tech products like advanced versions of toolmaking equipment for factories.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are certain areas where Europe has an edge, actually,\u201d said Antonio Kr\u00fcger, the chief executive of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. \u201cThis is an asset that I think the U.S. and China currently don\u2019t have at that level of quality and amount.\u201d<\/p>\n