Europe, including Poland, has for years been losing its technological sovereignty to giants from Asia and the United States. According to a report by the Digital Poland Foundation, the lack of such sovereignty leads to lower profits for European companies, loss of know-how, the growing mediatization of politics and weaker defence capabilities. Experts argue that rebuilding technological sovereignty requires, among other things, stronger European cooperation, better use of public procurement and support for local content.
“Europe and Poland lost their technological sovereignty because we were naïve. Europe opened itself economically to the entire world. Meanwhile, in Asia and the United States, successive standards and certification requirements were introduced. As a result, we could not enter Asian markets in the same way that Asian companies could enter ours,” says Piotr Mieczkowski, board member of the Polish Chamber of Electronics and Telecommunications and managing director of the Digital Poland Foundation, in an interview with Newseria.
Europe’s dependence on global technology giants is the result of years of neglect and mistaken strategic assumptions, according to the publication Technological Sovereignty of Poland and Europe. Public Opinion Survey Report. 2026 Edition, prepared by the Digital Poland Foundation. The report argues that the openness of the European Union’s borders collided with market barriers in Asia. Examples include demanding security certification systems, such as Korea’s CSAP and Japan’s ISMAP, which create barriers to entry for foreign suppliers.
Experts also point out that Europe wrongly assumed that relocating production to the Far East would not bring negative consequences. In reality, this process led to the loss of invaluable know-how.
“We moved factory production to Asia, so today an engineer has no access to the factory and does not see the problems that could be solved there. As a result, Asia, but also the United States, built their know-how at Europe’s expense,” explains Piotr Mieczkowski.
Another problem highlighted in the report is the trap of “free” services and the drainage of data.
“We know that nothing is free. We handed over consumer and business data to digital platforms, which used it to build their artificial intelligence algorithms. These algorithms now dominate the media and also take advertising profits away from us,” says the managing director of Digital Poland and author of the report. “There is another important issue: we financed it ourselves. Europe has a capital surplus, which it effectively exports to the United States. In this way, we are subsidising the conquest of our own market by exporting capital.”
The report identifies a number of consequences that Europe faces as a result of lacking technological sovereignty. One of the key risks concerns security and continuity of operations in the event of shortages of critical components, such as semiconductors, or a state or company being cut off from essential services. This also includes risks related to the loss of intellectual property and the manipulation of democratic processes through foreign platforms and AI algorithms.
Another serious consequence is the weakening of domestic and European business.
“Research shows that in countries where technological sovereignty is preserved, business margins and profitability are around 25–35 percent, and in the case of the world’s largest companies, such as Nvidia, even 70 percent. We, as Polish and European companies, have significantly reduced margins, at the level of 5–15 percent,” says Piotr Mieczkowski. “Of course, we are also losing defence capabilities. Europe currently does not have a single public procurement market for defence orders, and dual-use technologies, such as drones, very often have to be bought from abroad.”
According to the expert, the price of technological dependence also includes the mediatization of politics and the marginalisation of the proper law-making process. Today, short videos and online reach increasingly displace the voice of business self-government in legislative processes, meaning that experts and officials lose the attention of decision-makers.
“Traditional media have ceased to play such a major role, while the importance of algorithms and polarising social media has increased. In a way, the dialogue between chambers of commerce, government, academia and business has collapsed. We have become slaves to reels, mediatization and the race for reach,” says the KIGEiT expert. “We must restore the role of business self-government. In Poland, there is no obligation to belong to such organisations, as there is in France, Germany and some other countries, but we need to place much greater emphasis on dialogue and move away from mediatization and social media reels.”
One of the European Union’s measures aimed at strengthening the European defence industry through joint procurement is the EDIRPA instrument. It encourages Member States to jointly purchase defence industry products. Its budget amounts to EUR 310 million, of which EUR 300 million comes from the European Union and EUR 10 million from Norway. Member States can also carry out joint defence procurement under the SAFE programme.
“There are a number of remedial actions we can take to regain technological sovereignty in Europe and Poland. Above all, we must act together. No country — Poland, France or Germany — can create a sovereign Europe on its own. We need to build large European corporations and consortia,” says Piotr Mieczkowski. “We also need to do what non-European countries have been doing for decades: focus on local content, buy European and Polish products and, above all, stop discriminating against them. Today, tenders for laptops, cloud services or artificial intelligence very often directly specify non-European technologies. We must move away from this.”
Digital Poland experts note that since 2017, 70 percent of AI models have been developed in the United States. In the European Union, meanwhile, 70 percent of cloud processing is handled by American companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
“We must also focus on developing open source software, which can be developed in the public sector in cooperation with the private sector. We cannot allow the nationalisation of the IT sector, because that would restrict the operations of our companies,” the expert emphasises.
Countries such as Denmark, France and Germany have recognised the threat posed by the “vendor lock-in” trap and are systematically replacing foreign licences, including office suites and communicators, in their public administration. They are doing so by imposing and co-developing open source solutions from the top down. According to the authors of the report, this ensures code transparency, independence from suppliers’ decisions and, ultimately, multi-billion-euro savings.
The public opinion survey conducted for the Digital Poland Foundation report shows that more than half of Poles believe national technological sovereignty is important or very important. They are also aware of the potential consequences of dependence on suppliers from third countries, including the risk of remote shutdowns of critical infrastructure or espionage and surveillance by non-European services.
Importantly, Poles show a high willingness to pay what the report describes as a “sovereignty premium”. More than 70 percent of respondents are willing to pay more for domestic solutions, with “more” usually meaning up to 10 percent. When it comes to trust in technology, products and services, nearly half of society declares that Polish or European capital in critical infrastructure and e-services increases their sense of security.
