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The European continent, as well as other parts of the world, is living through the digital revolution and a worldwide race to shape the AI future: these technologies are transforming the ways people live, work and govern their economies. The vital issues are not only how to finance European technological sovereignty ambitions; it is important to “really identify the areas” where the EU has had “risky dependencies”.
Thus, the timing of Jan Damsgaard’s book*) could hardly be timelier and more promising. Although it is published in March 2026 by Djøf Forlag, it landed on shelves just weeks before the European Commission took its most consequential step yet on the question the book addresses: on 3 June 2026, the Commission adopted an ambitious set of measures to bolster the EU’s digital autonomy, a package that Damsgaard’s framework helps to illuminate and contextualize with a rare analytical clarity.
*) Jan Damsgaard. Digital Suverænitet. – Djøf Forlag, 2026, 196 pp. In Danish.
Source: https://imusic.dk/books/9788757468663/jan-damsgaard-2026-laerebog-digital-suveraenitet-haeftet-bog
Jan Damsgaard, professor at Copenhagen Business School and one of Denmark’s most prominent voices at the intersection of technology, business and geopolitics, argues that the world has shifted from rules to raw power – and that this power is increasingly exercised digitally. Denmark and Europe, he contends, have made themselves efficient and agile precisely by embracing digitalization; but in doing so, they have also made themselves profoundly vulnerable. When critical digital services are owned, operated and largely controlled by external powers, “the access can -in principle- be restricted with a click of a mouse”; thus, he noted, that sovereignty, would not be a moral choice or an ICT component, but a strategic condition”. (p. 10-11). The book is a vital addition to the “digital sovereignty” concept in the recent June-2026 new EU proposal.
More on the EU tech-sovereignty in https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tech-sovereignty
The book’s argument gains urgency from the scale of the dependency problem the EU is only now starts “seriously confronting”. The European Union is presently heavily relying on a couple of non-EU countries for over 80% of key digital products, services, infrastructure and intellectual property. At the cloud layer specifically, Amazon, Google and Microsoft control around 70 percent of the EU’s cloud market. These are not abstract geopolitical risks but structural vulnerabilities in numerous spheres of public administration, healthcare, energy and finance. Damsgaard’s scenario analysis (e.g. in chapter 9) by asking what organizations (and the EU, generally) should do if terms change, access is restricted, or geopolitical shocks strike their digital foundations, and translates these systemic risks into concrete organizational preparedness.
The June-2026 EU package, formally titled the European Technological Sovereignty Package, includes two legislative proposals: the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act, supplemented by an Open-Source Strategy and a Strategic Roadmap for digitalisation and AI in energy. The package marks the bloc’s most ambitious attempt yet to reduce dependence on non-European providers, including plans to bar cloud companies that fail to meet new EU sovereignty criteria from sensitive government contracts, and emergency powers to prioritize chip production during supply crises.
The investment ambitions are staggering: an estimated €120 billion for semiconductors, €200 billion for data centers by 2036, €100 billion for cloud and AI, and €2 billion for open-source software over seven years.
From digital sovereignty to autonomy and self-sufficiency
The European Commission proposed the “tech sovereignty package” to strengthen the EU-wide digital autonomy and resilience, which are the key words in the moder digital sovereignty, or DS. The “sovereignty’s move” in science and governance has come at a period when Europe remains heavily dependent on suppliers outside the EU for core digital technologies, and when the demand for computing capacity rises in the member states alongside the active AIs deployment. Thus, the package signals a major shift in the EU’s approach to both the technology, in general, and the digital one, in particular.
The initiative’s package is mainly designed at reducing the so-called “structural dependencies” in digital technologies and ensure that the EU member states are able to “develop, deploy and secure” technologies to satisfy European growth priorities.
The Commission, however, pointed out that the DS (which the EU rather called “complete self-sufficiency”) was “not the ultimate goal”, and that the EU would prefer to cooperate world-wide in the future of the digital transition. But it is important to really identify those areas where the EU has had “risky dependencies”.
As the Commission President said, that the Europeans would not depend on third states for the technologies that facilitate health care and secure the energy grids stability. To accomplish the task, the EU states already has acquired all the necessary components: the talent, the research excellence, the industrial base and the European Single Market. It is now the time “to turn these strengths into technological sovereignty”, she noted.
As soon an energy is becoming a vital element in DS, the EU member states have to strive for the leadership positions in the energy’s transformations coped with the EU values concentrated in responsible, sustainable and beneficial to European consumers and businesses. Hence, the strategy is “to manage the growing energy demands of digitalisation while unlocking the immense innovative opportunities”, added Commissioner for European energy.
More in: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5445de81-9481-4335-9902-9756159ba614_en?filename=one-europe-one-market-roadmap.pdf
The EU-DS package contains four new initiatives, that can be regarded as the modern European continent’s digital sovereignty strategy:
a) composing a legal framework aimed at encouraging semiconductor production inside the EU (known as the Chips Act 2.0);
b) establishing a legal framework to strengthen the EU’s cloud computing and AI industries;
c) adopting plan for digitalisation and AI use in the energy sector; and
d) formulating strategy for encouraging open-source software in European technology companies: there are already over three million open-source contributors on the continent!
However, there are already some evident “tensions” between the two concepts – sovereignty and competitiveness. They are specifically named in the Chips Act 2.0, which aims to increase European semiconductor production. For example, Julia Hess, a researcher on global chip dynamics at Interface, notes that “the semiconductor value chain is extraordinarily complex, characterised by a transnational division of labour, diverse business models and multiple chip types”; she added that the “full sovereignty in the semiconductor space is simply not realistic”.
Source and citation from: https://sciencebusiness.net/news/sovereignty/commission-announces-plans-eu-tech-sovereignty-amid-fears-competitiveness-hit
Building European cloud and AI capacity is one of the major DS strategy’s new directions. The Cloud and AI Development Act (in its new version, it is scheduled for approval by the end of 2027) has been a central part of the EU’s larger initiative – the AI Continent Action Plan adopted in 2025. On the action plan in:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/ai-continent-action-plan
Note. The Cloud and AI Development Act defines cloud and AI sovereignty comprising four assurance levels: – where data is processed and stored in infrastructure located in the Union;
– where providers must demonstrate independence from third countries and transparency over their software supply chain; – where providers must be owned and controlled from the EU and meet additional criteria, such as personnel citizenship (the Commission can recognise third-country providers); and – where providers have full transparency and control over their software supply chain without any interference from a third country.
Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cloud-and-ai-development-act
So, the new “EU-wide Cloud” is aimed to triple EU’s data center capacity during next five – seven years, and strengthen the role of the Apply AI strategy to boost the digital transition and adoption. Besides, the “Apply AI Strategy” is not only to enhance the competitiveness of strategic sectors and strengthen the EU’s technological sovereignty; it strives to boost AI adoption and innovation across Europe, particularly among SMEs.
More in: https://www.eu-cloud-ai-act.com/
Contemplating the digital sovereignty perspectives
The Damsgaard’s book shall be understood as an anticipatory primer for precisely the institutional and organizational transition the new EU-wide package now demands. A separate Cloud and AI Development Act will require EU capitals to conduct “sovereignty risk assessments” to determine how much of existing infrastructure is reliant on technology provided by non-EU companies, which is in effect an institutionalized version of the diagnostic exercise Damsgaard proposes at the organizational level.
However, the book is not without limitations: thus, written primarily for the Danish corporate and public-sector leadership audience, its “registered audience” is managerial rather than scholarly, and readers seeking engagement with the academic literature on platform capitalism, digital geopolitics, or the comparative political economy of technology will find the theoretical scaffolding relatively sparse. So, without surprise, the book is soon to be translated into other languages!
The five-level maturity model (chapter 9), while is practically useful, raises questions that the book does not fully address: the digital “maturity”- towards what end, and under whose definition of sovereignty? The concept itself, as scholars such as Pohle J. and Thiel T. have noted in the European context already in 2020, carries different meanings depending on whether the referent is the state, the firm, the citizen or the continent.
Source: Pohle, Julia and Thiel, Thorsten, Digital sovereignty (December 17, 2020). Pohle, J. & Thiel, T. Digital sovereignty. Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1532, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4081180
These reservations aside, the book’s virtues are considerable. Damsgaard writes with enviable clarity and compression (196 pages is precisely the right length for this argument), and his interdisciplinary command – moving fluidly between business strategy, geopolitics, and digital infrastructure economics – reflects decades of serious engagement with these questions.
For Danish organizations, public agencies and corporate entities grappling with what the new EU framework will actually demand of them, Damsgaard’s “sovereignty” offers the most accessible and operationally useful guide currently available in Danish.
In an era when, as Damsgaard puts it, sovereignty is a strategic condition rather than a moral posture, this book arrives exactly when it is needed most. Damsgaard’s book is astute to reframe sovereignty as a management problem rather than a geopolitical abstraction, which is analytically useful. But it probably underweights the question of whose sovereignty and for whose benefit, which is where the politics of this agenda get genuinely contested.