Europe Turns to Open Source as Digital Sovereignty Becomes Strategic Priority

At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe, the foundation's Madalin Neag and Mirko Boehm argued that many of Europe's seemingly separate technology initiatives—from NIS2 and DORA to the Cyber Resilience Act and the broader Tech Sovereignty agenda—ultimately converge on one problem: securing the software supply chains that underpin Europe's economy.

The global technology race is being led by the United States and China, according to the report. The US has hyperscalers, Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and large amounts of capital flowing into AI infrastructure. China has its own sprawling artificial intelligence ecosystem, domestic chip ambitions and companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and DeepSeek. Both are competing for chips, electrical energy and data center capacity, while Europe appears sidelined.

The European Commission acknowledges the position. After years of regulatory leadership and investment, non-EU providers still account for more than 80 percent of the bloc's digital products, services, infrastructure and even intellectual property.

The Commission launched a new technological sovereignty package in June 2026. It includes Chips Act 2.0, the Cloud and AI Development Act, a roadmap for digitalization and AI in energy, and a new EU Open Source Strategy. The open source strategy is significant because open source already powers most of the technology Europe relies on, from cloud infrastructure to financial services, government systems and AI.

The Commission estimates that around €2 billion ($2.23 billion) in public and private investment will be needed for the open source strategy over the next seven years. That includes expanding the Open Internet Stack as a one-stop shop for open source building blocks, supporting open source business accelerators, encouraging use in public procurement and research and development programs such as Horizon Europe, and working with member states through initiatives including the Digital Commons EDIC.

While the word sovereignty might suggest technological isolation, the EU's approach is described as the opposite. Digital sovereignty means ensuring European organizations can choose, inspect, maintain and replace the technologies they depend on, instead of being locked into walled gardens and infrastructure controlled by others. As AI reshapes the global technology market, that dependence becomes more consequential. Building and running advanced AI requires enormous amounts of compute, energy and data center capacity, areas in which US and Chinese companies are investing heavily. For Europe, the risk is that the next generation of critical digital infrastructure becomes dominated by foreign technology before a competitive European ecosystem can emerge.

The Commission estimates Europe will need around €200 billion ($223 billion) to expand data center capacity by 2036, mostly from the private sector, plus another €100 billion ($111 billion) for cloud and AI initiatives, AI Factories and Gigafactories. US electricity consumption is expected to reach record highs this year and in 2027, with AI and data centers as major drivers. Europe cannot simply outspend either side, so it sees open source as an alternative route to reducing strategic exposure, TechRadar reported.

For businesses, downloading more open source software is not enough. One of the clearest messages from Neag and Boehm's presentation was that organizations cannot secure a supply chain passively. Businesses that download dependencies, integrate them into products, scan them and then maintain private patches risk accumulating technical debt while the upstream projects deteriorate.

They said active participation is needed instead: identifying critical open source dependencies, establishing relationships with maintainers, contributing fixes upstream and, where appropriate, providing long-term financial support. They argued that suggested code contributions can return 3.3 times their cost, community contributions 2.5 times, and direct financial contributions 2.3 times, giving a commercial incentive as well.