Europe’s Sovereign Compute Capacity
AI Factories, cloud, data centres and the industrial infrastructure of strategic autonomy
Europe’s AI challenge is no longer confined to model development, software talent or regulatory design. It is becoming an infrastructure question. Advanced AI depends on access to supercomputers, accelerators, data centres, energy, cloud platforms, secure software stacks, trusted data governance and operational control over the environments in which models are trained, deployed and supervised. For Europe, this creates a strategic problem. The continent can regulate AI, finance industrial adoption and support research excellence, but it cannot exercise durable autonomy if its critical compute layer remains dependent on non-European hyperscalers, externally controlled chip supply chains, scarce GPU capacity, constrained data-centre sites and cloud architectures exposed to legal or operational dependencies outside Europe. Sovereign compute is therefore not a narrow digital-policy theme. It is an industrial base issue, a public-sector capacity issue, a defence-adjacent resilience issue and an investment theme centred on the firms and infrastructures able to convert EU AI policy into recurring demand.
The report is structured in four sections. The first defines sovereign compute as a strategic industrial base and explains why AI capability depends on the combined control of compute, data, energy, cloud, cybersecurity and software infrastructure. The second examines the European policy and regulatory architecture, including AI Continent, EuroHPC, AI Factories, AI Gigafactories, the AI Act, the Data Act, the Data Governance Act, cloud sovereignty, semiconductor policy and cybersecurity legislation. The third analyses the industrial stack and its bottlenecks, from supercomputers, GPUs, processors and sovereign cloud to data-centre capacity, grid access, cooling, permitting and SME access to compute. The fourth draws the defence-finance and investment implications, identifying where European policy is most likely to generate procurement, infrastructure contracts, software adoption, compliance demand, cloud revenues and strategic industrial positioning between 2025 and 2030.