Meanwhile, European Union is looking at “targeted amendments” to AI Act to reduce the impact on foreign AI infrastucture firms
While it seems hyperscalers are vying to invest the most in Europe’s AI infrastructure, the results of a recent survey by Gartner found 61% of 241 respondents said they intend to “increase their reliance on local or regional cloud providers” due to geopolitical factors. The respondents were CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe. They showed increasing concern about their data, operations and tech hosted on the cloud platforms of overseas firms.
Gartner predicts that by 2030, more than 75% of all enterprises outside the US will have a digital sovereignty strategy. Some 53% of respondents said geopolitics will limit their organisation’s future choice of global cloud providers and 44% said geopolitics is already influencing their choice.
Regulation is one factor driving sovereignty. Rene Buest, a Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, stated, “Many western European organisations can’t run all of their workloads or core systems in a non-European cloud environment. This is either because they are subject to specific regulations, their customers demand it, or they are considered part of a country’s critical infrastructure.”
EU to water down AI regulation?
Meanwhile, it seems Henna Virkkunen, the European Commissioner for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, is looking to lessen the impact of the upcoming AI Act according to Euronews reporting from the Web Summit in Lisbon.
A big criticisms of the AI Act is that it will stifle innovation and Europe will lag even further behind North America and Asia Pacific in AI tech and digitalisation. Virkkunen is apparently looking at how changes to the law could accommodate the AI community. At the same time, she also emphasised the European Commission is still committed to the main principles of the law.
The Act is being introduced in phases with the next one due to come into force in August 2026, which will be challenging to say the least. Virkkunen was quoted acknowledging, “We have to look at how we can create legal certainty for our industries, and that’s something that we are now considering: How we can support our industries when we don’t have the standards in place.”
The amendments will be announced on 19 November – and could have profound ramifications for telcos, as Omdia pointed out recently.
