The European Commission has presented the “Cloud and AI Development Law”, an initiative aimed at alleviating Europe's historic deficit in cloud and high-performance computing capacity, a key factor for the development of artificial intelligence and the reuse of open data.
According to the European Parliament Research Service (EPRS), the European Union lags behind the United States in data center infrastructure, despite having a similar GDP, and is largely dependent on suppliers from outside the EU, which puts the competitiveness and sustainability of the European digital ecosystem at risk.
The new law aims to increase research and innovation in more efficient computing technologies, expand investments in data centers and promote secure and sovereign cloud infrastructures. The aim is to reduce the capacity deficit that limits both the development of advanced AI models and the processing of public sector information. In a context marked by the increase in energy demand for these systems, Brussels considers it essential to have a more resilient infrastructure to ensure that open data remains accessible, interoperable and cost-effective.
The EPRS underlines that a strong EU-based infrastructure is essential to fully exploit the value of high-quality open data, as it requires reliable and scalable computing capacity to be processed and shared at scale. Both centralised AI training and decentralised cloud systems rely on this technology base.
In the long term, the “Cloud and AI Development Act” could open up new opportunities for data-driven innovation, especially if accompanied by open standards, interoperability measures and a strong commitment to European digital sovereignty.
