The EU Commission has allocated € 1.3 billion ($ 1.4 billion ) to “technical investment” that it believes will be” strategieically significant” for the continent’s future.
The Digital Europe Programme ( DIGITAL ) work programme will be fueled by the investment for 2025 through 2027. While that’s the name of a number of technologies, it independence is what the EU aims to achieve as it competes with nations like the United States and China.
Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said,” Securing Western tech independence starts with investing in sophisticated technology and making it possible for people to boost their online competences.”
With the possibilities provided by the Digital Europe Programme, she continued,” We are making sure that European citizens, businesses, and public services are served by new innovations and have access to fresh potential.”
Among the objectives of the DIGITAL work programme are testing “immersive surroundings,” also known as virtual worlds, with concern for the health and care sectors. promoting the implementation of the architecture and the Continental Trust Infrastructure, as well as developing electric skills by boosting the capacity of EU education and training institutions, and boosting security endurance by focusing on cybersecurity solutions.
In addition, funding for the European Digital Innovation Hubs ( ) is a top priority because they will give businesses and the public sector access to technical expertise and technology testing, and they will encourage the employment of AI in Europe. An award-winning initiative called , which is creating a modern counterpart of the Earth to assist climate change and disaster risk management, will receive funding to create an even stronger model.
Additionally, funding will support the creation of “efficient, high-quality, interconnected” digital public services. With the new Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (), which recognizes “promising jobs” as having a higher standard for access to public and private financing, improvements in these interests may be made more quickly.
The total budget under the current Multiannual Financial Framework ( 2021-2027 ) is$ 8.7 billion, which includes other EU funding initiatives like Horizon Europe, EU4Health, InvestEU, and the Connecting Europe Facility. This month is expected when the DIGITAL work programme’s first calls for proposals are released, with additional funding opportunities coming up throughout the year.
According to the think tank, partnering with India could strengthen EU tech sovereignty.
Analysts are looking into whether India could inspire and support the EU in its quest for tech sovereignty as tensions between the EU and the Trump administration highlight the risks of the EU relying heavily on U.S. technology.
Chloe Teevan and Gautam Kamath, both heads of the digital economy and governance at the think tank ECDPM and independent consultants and associates of ECDPM, co-write about the shared goals of the EU and other world powers that are concerned by their technological dependence on the United States.
The authors mention the groundbreaking from September 2024, which has helped to sway the urgency of the EU’s position on the subject, which placed a premium on developing advanced technologies. The initiative, which calls for a new European approach to tech infrastructures “across the technology stack,” from hard infrastructure to software platforms, was launched shortly after.
In fact, other nations have already had significant success creating particular parts of the stack, and their accomplishments could provide significant learning opportunities for the EU,” the authors write.
India’s digital public infrastructure, which includes digital ID, digital payments, data exchange, and most recently a new e-commerce layer, the Open Network for Digital Commerce ( ONDC ), provides its population of nearly 1.4 billion people with access to both public and private digital services.
They point out that India demonstrated that this infrastructure-based approach to digital services could be rolled out at scale by building this “interim layer” of digital infrastructure from the ground up, in partnership with the private sector, and using it to connect public and private services.
The authors contend that a “wider exchange” is required because on February 28, the EU and India agreed to work together across various components of the digital stack. The full post can be found on the London School of Economics blog.
European initiative to promote digital sovereignty is launched by the Linux Foundation Europe.
The , which will concentrate on collaboration and innovation in open cloud infrastructure and European digital sovereignty, has been created by The Linux Foundation Europe.
” Linux Foundation Europe is proud to support the launch of NeoNephos, which is a significant step forward in supporting Europe’s cloud sovereignty goals through open source,” said Gabriele Columbro, general manager of Linux Foundation Europe.
The goal is to create open, cross-operable technologies to serve the needs of European governments and businesses. Clyso, Cyberus Technology, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, TNO – ECOFED, and 23 Technologies GmbH are founding members of the NeoNephos Foundation. One of the first open-source outcomes of the EU investment program IPCEI-CIS is NeoNephos.
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