Why Europe?
Europe outsourced its digital life to Silicon Valley and its supply chains to Beijing. Here is why that matters — and what you can do about it.
For decades, Europe has outsourced its digital life to Silicon Valley and its supply chains to Beijing. It was convenient. It was cheap. And for a long time, it seemed harmless. But the cracks are showing. Geopolitical shocks, trade wars, data scandals, and kill switches have made one thing clear: dependency is a vulnerability. This page explains why choosing European products and services is one of the most meaningful decisions you can make — for your privacy, your economy, and your continent's future.
01 — Data Security
Your data isn't as safe as you think
You might assume that because you live in Europe, your data is protected by European law. Partially true. GDPR is real, and it matters. But there's a catch that most people don't know about.
American cloud providers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon — are subject to US law regardless of where their servers are located. The CLOUD Act and FISA Section 702 give US authorities the legal right to demand access to your data, even when it sits on a server in Frankfurt or Amsterdam. There is no opt-out. The company must comply, and often can't even tell you it happened.
As developer Koen Barmentlo noted: the EU–US Data Privacy Framework aims to protect Europeans from US data surveillance — but the watchdog overseeing these practices was dismantled, raising serious new concerns. dev.to/koenbarmentlo
The scale is striking. US firms control up to 40% of Europe's operational computing capability, hold an 80% share of the European cloud market, and account for 59% of Europe's enterprise software revenue.
02 — Geopolitical Risk
Not all suppliers are created equal
Europe relies on a surprisingly small number of countries for a surprisingly large share of its essential goods. That wouldn't be a problem — except that several of those countries have shown a willingness to use trade as a weapon.
A 2026 analysis identified 206 products that combine high foreign dependency with significant geopolitical risk. These aren't obscure industrial chemicals. They include smartphones, laptops, photovoltaic cells for solar panels, pharmaceutical ingredients, and rare earth materials like gallium and germanium — the building blocks of the modern economy. Nearly half of these dependencies have persisted unchanged every single year since 2017. Bonnet et al., VoxEU 2026
China supplies nearly half of all products the EU is structurally dependent on, and its grip on renewable energy components has doubled — from 40% to 80% of dependent products in the solar sector alone. Russia still dominates certain energy and steel inputs. And perhaps most surprisingly, the United States — a political ally — is the single most frequent user of trade restrictions in the data.
"Political alignment does not eliminate trade policy friction. Even like-minded partners can weaponise trade dependencies."
— Bonnet et al., VoxEU, May 2026
When supply chains break — as they did during COVID, and again during the energy crisis — the effects don't stay abstract. They hit production lines, hospital shelves, and energy bills. The question isn't whether disruption will happen again. It's whether Europe will be ready.
03 — Economic Competitiveness
Money spent here, stays here
Every time a European business subscribes to Microsoft 365, buys server capacity from Amazon Web Services, or licenses software from a US provider, money leaves the European economy. Multiplied across millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers, the scale is staggering.
80% of Europe's digital technology is imported. Of the world's 50 largest tech companies, only four are European. European entrepreneurs increasingly relocate to the United States — not because they lack ambition or talent, but because the investment climate there is more favourable. As Tom Rood, financial markets expert at the NVB, noted: European entrepreneurs move their companies to America more and more often because the necessary investment climate is missing in Europe. NVB blog
The consequences compound over time. The EU's AI-related imports grew by just 40% between 2023 and 2025. In the same period, the US tripled its AI infrastructure investment. Asia now accounts for 65% of global AI-related exports.
€800bn
additional annual investment Europe needs to stay digitally competitive
Draghi report
€300bn
estimated cost of building a sovereign European tech stack by 2035
When you choose a European alternative, you are:
- Keeping tax revenue in Europe
- Funding local R&D and jobs
- Supporting companies that reinvest locally
- Building the ecosystem that makes the next European tech company possible
04 — Supply Chain Resilience
What happens when the supply stops?
Supply chain disruptions don't announce themselves. They cascade. And Europe has built a system where certain products — often mundane ones nobody thinks about until they disappear — flow through a very small number of chokepoints.
The uncomfortable truth is that diversification, the obvious solution, is often not actually possible. For many critical products, global production is dominated by so few exporters that alternatives at sufficient scale simply don't exist. Europe imports 57% of all its IT equipment and more than half of the hardware needed for its data centres from just five Asian countries: Taiwan, China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Bonnet et al., VoxEU 2026
Renewable energy
80% of EU dependency on solar components is concentrated in China. The green transition is being built on a fragile foundation.
Digital hardware
Smartphones, laptops, and semiconductors flow through supply chains beginning in Taiwan, Malaysia, and China.
Pharmaceuticals
Active ingredients for many essential medicines are produced almost exclusively in Asia.
Critical minerals
Gallium, germanium, and rare earths needed for electronics, EV batteries, and defence equipment come from a handful of sources.
05 — Tech Sovereignty in Practice
Europe is already moving — faster than you think
The shift away from US technology isn't a distant aspiration. It's already happening. And it accelerated sharply after one incident in May 2025: the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court lost access to his Microsoft Outlook email after Trump signed an executive order sanctioning him. It was a stark demonstration of how US technology can become a political instrument. The ICC subsequently announced it would migrate entirely to OpenDesk, a European open-source alternative. WIRED
🇫🇷 France — Central government
Over 40,000 civil servants have switched to Visio, France's home-built video conferencing platform, with the full government committed to moving off Zoom and Microsoft Teams by 2027. A suite of tools called LaSuite covers messaging, email, file sharing, and document editing. France's health data platform is moving from Microsoft to French cloud provider Scaleway. Tchap, the government's messaging app, already has 420,000 active users.
🏙️ Lyon — City government
70% of Lyon's 9,000 employees have migrated from Microsoft Office to open-source OnlyOffice. The city plans to move to Linux as its operating system.
"Being on open source platforms is not only about sovereignty — it's also about maintenance. When you have proprietary solutions, you always rely on one company." — Valentin Lungenstrass, Deputy Mayor of Lyon
🇳🇱 Netherlands
The Dutch parliament warned that the country's digital infrastructure is "dangerously dependent on American providers" and called for a formal Plan B. Government code has moved off Microsoft-owned GitHub onto self-hosted servers. Developer Koen Barmentlo notes the dependency is visible at ground level:
"At my workplace, this dependency is evident — Microsoft Azure for hosting, Dell laptops with Windows, and Google for email." — Koen Barmentlo, dev.to/koenbarmentlo
🇩🇪 🇦🇹 🇩🇰 Others
Austria's armed forces migrated to LibreOffice. Denmark is phasing out Microsoft Teams from public institutions. Eight European countries — including France and Germany — have formally partnered on digital sovereignty efforts. Since early 2025, Nextcloud has seen a threefold increase in potential new customers.
06 — European Identity
We have more in common than we think
Ask a European what Europe is, and they'll often struggle to answer. The EU is bureaucracy and regulations, they'll say. It's the euro. It's Schengen. It's Brussels. Rarely do people reach for something deeper — a shared culture, a shared story, a shared way of seeing the world.
But the shared story exists, and it goes back further than most people realise. According to Dr. Lieke Stelling, associate professor of English literature at Utrecht University and specialist in European identity, Europeans have been asking "what binds us?" since the fifteenth century — fed by the age of exploration and the invention of the printing press, both of which brought Europeans into contact with other ideas and cultures. NPO Radio 1
What gave early modern Europe a shared cultural identity wasn't a common language or government — it was stories. Books were translated and distributed across the continent. Works like Utopia (1516) and Don Quixote (1605) formed the foundation of a common European imagination.
"We won't move forward as Europe without things that bind us. The EU focuses on defence, bureaucracy, and the euro — not on culture. Europe is missing an anchor, and the key lies in our shared history."
— Dr. Lieke Stelling, Universiteit Utrecht. NPO Radio 1
Today that shared inheritance is rarely the starting point for conversations about European cooperation. Defence spending, trade agreements, regulatory frameworks — these are the EU's language. Culture is treated as a soft afterthought.
Privacy is a European value — written into law more firmly here than anywhere else in the world. Transparency and accountability are European values. The idea that markets should serve people, rather than the other way around, is a European value.
When you choose a European product, you are — in a small but real way — voting for those values.
07 — Regulation as Advantage
Europe's rules are becoming the world's rules
It has become fashionable to dismiss European regulation as a drag on innovation. That argument ignores something important: Europe's regulatory frameworks have become the de facto global standard for digital rights, and that is a form of power.
When the EU passed GDPR in 2018, US tech companies didn't build a separate "Europe version" of their products. They updated their global products to comply — because the European market was too important to walk away from. The same dynamic is now playing out with the AI Act, NIS2, and DORA. What Brussels decides, the world gradually adopts.
Search demand for "European alternatives" surged 660% year-on-year as enterprises woke up to the conflict between US cloud services and European compliance law. 63% of European IT and compliance leaders say they would switch to EU tools if migration were simpler.
GDPR — The template
Passed in 2018, GDPR became the world's most replicated data protection law. Dozens of countries have since passed laws modelled on it — from Brazil to South Korea to California. European users set the standard the rest of the world follows.
The AI Act — The next wave
The EU's AI Act is the first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence anywhere in the world. Companies building AI for European markets must meet its standards. Once again, European values are being written into global technology.
Open source as public infrastructure
Europe's sovereignty push has accelerated investment in open-source tools that anyone can use. The French government's LaSuite contributes back to a global commons — building shared digital infrastructure rather than proprietary silos.
That's why I created PickEurope — to help people find European alternatives for the services they use every day.
Start somewhere.
Switching everything overnight is not realistic. Start where it matters most — your email, your cloud storage, your business tools — and replace one thing at a time.
The European alternative probably already exists. It's time to start using it.