Consider a quiet office in Munich, London, or Paris. A team of engineers hunches over dual monitors, building the software meant to run the local power grid, manage hospital wait times, or route emergency services. Everything looks domestic. The team speaks the local language. The funding came from a local bank.
But look closer at the glowing screens. Also making news recently: The Geopolitical Illusion of China's Massive Open Source AI Models.
The code they write runs on a cloud server owned by a company in Seattle. The artificial intelligence model helping them debug their code is hosted by a lab in San Francisco. The productivity tools managing their workflow are billed monthly from Delaware. If a single corporate entity across the Atlantic decides to alter its terms of service, adjust its pricing, or comply with a sudden export restriction from Washington, that office in Munich falls silent.
This is the quiet architecture of dependence. More insights into this topic are explored by Wired.
For decades, Europe treated technology as a commodity. You bought it off the shelf from whoever built it best and cheapest. That usually meant the United States. It was a convenient arrangement that allowed the continent to skip the messy, expensive, and high-risk work of building its own digital infrastructure.
But the bill is finally coming due.
Klaus Hommels, the early-stage venture capitalist who backed some of Europe’s rarest breakout successes—including Spotify and Revolut—is trying to wake up a continent comfortable in its slumber. His message is simple: Europe is living in a rented house, and the landlord is starting to look volatile.
The wake-up call arrived without a siren. It came in the form of a bureaucratic decision in Washington to restrict Anthropic, an American artificial intelligence lab, from exporting its highly sensitive AI models. It was a routine national security decision for the United States, but it sent a shudder through European technology circles.
If an American regulator can switch off the intelligence driving your software with a stroke of a pen, do you really own your business? Do you really own your security?
"If you don't get the message now and still believe these fairy tales that are told to you by the salespeople of American technologies, then this is without responsibility," Hommels warned. He is not talking about consumer apps or social media feeds. He is talking about the fundamental capabilities a society needs to survive. "You need to be as independent as you can, and that means the technology as well as the financing of the technology."
For years, the relationship was transactional and polite. European regulators fined American tech giants for antitrust violations, and American companies paid the fines as a cost of doing business.
That polite distance has evaporated.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative recently made a direct, aggressive move, threatening retaliation against European crown jewels like Spotify, SAP, and Siemens. The subtext was clear: if Europe continues to aggressively regulate American technology companies, the United States can and will make life miserable for European companies operating on American soil.
This is no longer a academic debate about data privacy or digital sovereignty. It is a geopolitical game of chicken, and Europe is starting with a weaker hand.
To understand why, you have to look at how technology gets built. It does not start with code; it starts with capital.
When a European founder has a breakthrough idea, they can usually find a few hundred thousand euros from local angel investors. But when that company needs fifty million to build a factory, hire a massive engineering team, or train an AI model, the European venture ecosystem often runs dry.
The founder gets on a flight to San Francisco or London. They take American money.
With that money comes American governance, American board members, and eventually, the inevitable pressure to relocate the corporate headquarters to Delaware. The intellectual property migrates. The talent follows. The value created by European minds is captured by foreign pension funds and venture firms.
Hommels is trying to break this cycle. His venture capital firm, Lakestar, recently closed a $300 million "resilience" fund. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions sloshing around Silicon Valley, but the purpose is highly specific: backing dual-use and defense technology companies across Europe and NATO-allied countries.
The fund’s advisory board reads like a security summit, featuring former US top diplomat Mike Pompeo, former UK Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nicholas Carter, and former German armed forces chief of staff Volker Wieker. This is not capital designed to fund another food delivery app. It is capital designed to build drone interceptors, rocket engines, and sovereign defense networks.
The shift is uncomfortable for a continent that has spent the last eighty years outsourcing its physical security to NATO and its digital security to Silicon Valley. But the geopolitical reality has changed.
The war in Ukraine brought artillery back to Europe's doorstep and turned the skies into a testing ground for cheap, autonomous drones. It proved that modern conflicts are won not just with tanks, but with software updates, satellite constellations, and immediate data analysis.
Imagine a crisis where a European state needs to deploy autonomous reconnaissance systems to secure its borders. If those systems rely on proprietary American cloud infrastructure or US-licensed AI models, the host country has a massive vulnerability. In an escalatory situation, the priorities of Washington and the priorities of Brussels may not align perfectly.
"It is important that the overall governance is European," Hommels points out. "If there’s an escalative situation, the governance needs to be in a situation to prioritise European interests first."
Building this independence requires more than just patriotic sentiment. It requires a hard look at how Europe manages its resources.
The continent has no shortage of wealth. European citizens save money at high rates, and European pension funds manage trillions of euros. But those funds are historically risk-averse. They invest in government bonds, stable real estate, and legacy industrial giants. They rarely fund the volatile, high-stakes startups that build the future.
The ultimate advantage that free societies have over autocracies is the ability to mobilize private capital quickly and direct it toward innovation. But that advantage only works if the capital is willing to take the leap.
Europe's defense startups, like the German drone firm Helsing or the rocket startup Isar Aerospace, are proving they can build world-class technology. Now, they need the scale. They need European governments to buy their products instead of defaulting to American defense giants. They need to merge, scale, and build companies large enough to compete on a global stage.
The transition from a comfortable consumer of technology to an active defender of its own digital borders will be expensive, politically difficult, and fraught with friction. It will require changing the risk appetite of conservative banks, rewriting procurement rules, and accepting that some bets will fail.
But the alternative is becoming a spectator in a world run by those who own the infrastructure.
When you do not own the tools you use to think, coordinate, and defend yourself, you do not truly own your future. You are simply renting it, day by day, hoping the landlord doesn't raise the price or change the locks.
