A Paris startup just landed a real contract inside the European Commission's sovereign cloud framework: a developer portal for up to 5,000 users, inside a six-year, 180 million euro deal spread across four providers. In Germany, meanwhile, a court just told Meta that not knowing about a scam ad is no longer an excuse.
Xi Jinping pitched an open-source AI coalition to BRICS that pointedly leaves the EU out, as Brussels' AI Act moves from paper to active fines. Sam Altman's OpenAI, meanwhile, wants the antitrust room to slow AI development that Europe closed off back in 2004.
Europe spent the week confronting how much of its digital and physical infrastructure it does not actually control, from satellite timekeeping to police databases shared with Washington. Regulators answered with some of their sharpest enforcement yet, while investors poured fresh capital into robotics and deep tech built to reduce that dependence. Underneath it all ran a single question: whether digital sovereignty is a slogan or something Europe is actually willing to fund and defend.