'Buy European': Airbus and others call for sovereign fund and higher Europe tech autonomy

Airbus and over 90 other European companies and lobby groups have called on the European Commission to create a sovereign infrastructure fund to boost public investment and bolster the region's autonomy in the tech sector.

In a March 14 letter addressed to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen, the signatories — which include Dassault Systemes, French cloud services supplier OVHcloud and the European Startup Network — stressed the need for Europe's technological self-reliance as it confronts a "stark reality" following "developments in U.S./EU relations."

"Building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now a recognised urgent imperative across Europe," the letter said. It stressed that Europe is now in a "laggard position" in the digital space — having been significantly outpaced by the U.S. and China — and will have a near-complete reliance on non-European technologies in less than three years at the current rate.

"Europe needs to recover the initiative, and become more technologically independent across all layers of its critical digital infrastructure: from logical Infrastructure — applications, platforms, media, AI frameworks and models — to physical Infrastructure — chips, computing, storage and connectivity," the letter says, warning that "Europe's current multiple dependencies create security and reliability risks, compromise our sovereignty and hurt our growth."

Chief among the letter's requests for a "pragmatic industrial policy strategy" is the need for Europe to inject a formal requirement for the public sector to "Buy European" as well as incentivize the private sector to steer toward similar purchases — with an aim "not to exclude non-European players, but to create space where European suppliers can legitimately compete (and justify investment)."

The letter also calls for the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund for public investments in tech, particularly in "capital-intensive" projects such as quantum and chips, requesting "significant" funds either allocated or underwritten by the European Investment Bank and by national public funding bodies.

Europe is striving to gain momentum in the tech sector, where executives and venture capitalists have been calling for additional investment and laxer regulation to rejuvenate growth — particularly in the booming AI space.

Last October, the founders of some of Europe's largest tech firms, including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, signed an open letter urging the creation of a single pan-European entity to promote start-ups and innovation in the bloc.

The letter noted fragmentation between countries in Europe where "legal and regulatory compliance is a burden, and cross-border collaboration is rare," which its signatories argued has stunted its competitiveness on a global tech stage.

Europe's dependency on the U.S. for critical technologies like AI also dominated discussions at the Web Summit technology conference in November, after U.S. President Donald Trump's electoral win.

Proton CEO Andy Yen told CNBC at the conference that Europe needs to adopt a similar mindset to American protectionism and become more "Europe-first" to counter the U.S.'s tech dominance.

Amid aggressive U.S. protectionist policies and tariff impositions, the European Union has increasingly sought to safeguard growth and bolster its autonomy, earlier this month proposing fiscal measures that could mobilize nearly 800 billion euros ($872 billion) toward the region's higher defense spend.

The shift in European tack on defense followed a public spat between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The newly elected White House leader decided to halt all military aid to Ukraine after the fall-out, driving Europe to boost its own defense capabilities in an effort to "massively step up" its support for Ukraine.

European defense stocks have rallied off the back of these discussions, with the regional Aerospace and Defense index shooting up by 35% since the beginning of the year.