However, the package has already been delayed several times — and Kleiner said Wednesday he can’t be certain it will come out on that date. “We are in the process, we have designed the package,” Kleiner said, adding that it’s up to the Commission’s top leaders to make the final call. Kleiner said in April that the package was running into “very effective lobbying,” amid a narrative that moving away from U.S. tech would be “too difficult, too expensive.”
His comments at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week suggest the Commission plans to take a tough approach to wean itself off foreign tech, particularly American cloud providers.
An increasing number of companies are realizing that their “survival is at stake” if everything they develop depends on technology they don’t control, he said. As a result they want more cloud capacity in Europe, he said. “I think we will try to work on this.”
He also hinted that the EU may try to boost European cloud firms’ fortunes by pushing governments to pick European industry through public procurement. “We will try to make sure that the public sector also gets its act together, and stop maybe doing things that are not reasonable in terms of having sovereign procurement,” he said.