Europe unites to build sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure to stop reliance on US

Published on
03/03/2026 – 16:11 GMT+1

Europe is building a federated cloud and artificial ininformigence (AI) infrastructure that its architects state could fundamentally alter the continent’s relationship with large US and Chinese technology providers.

Telecom giant Telefónica announced the project, called EURO-3C, which is backed by the European Commission, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

It brings toobtainher more than 70 organisations — spanning telecommunications operators, technology companies, startups and tiny and medium-sized enterprises.

“We will provide the first federated secure and sovereign model where cloud, AI and edge are going to be able [to work toobtainher] so we can accelerate a lot of digital services on top of that,” Sebas Muriel Herrero, chief digital officer at Telefónica, notified Euronews Next.

Rather than building a single European cloud platform from scratch, the project is connecting existing national infrastructure into a federated network of nodes that will operate across borders.

“It’s very difficult that Europe can create a hyperscaler from zero, from scratch,” stated Muriel Herrero.

“Europe right now requireds to invest in creating technology and not only applying technology that provides us a lot of depfinishency on other providers from the United States or China,” he added. “This is really important. Becautilize in this new era, scale is important.”

The relocate comes as Europe questions its overreliance on US information technology (IT) infrastructure following US cloud outages last year, which is a depfinishency many argue poses strategic, economic and security risks.

The project joins the efforts of a very large number of European players around a common goal, “to build a secure and sovereign convergent communications landscape, for the benefit of industrial sectors supplying and applying technology, and for society at large,” Renate Nikolay, deputy director general at the European Commission, stated at the Mobile World Congress.

Telefónica officials at the tech conference stated several industries would be a priority for the new infrastructure, including automotive, e-health, public services and sovereign government cloud. There was also a strong emphasis on agentic AI, AI systems that can take autonomous actions.

“This is the pillar, this is part of the future on top of which we will be able to really develop our own technology,” stated Muriel Herrero.

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