Can Europe achieve AI sovereignty?

Can Europe achieve AI sovereignty?

From The ITPro Podcast by ITPro

April 10, 2026 · 26 min · Episode 346

About this episode

The episode explores the concept of AI sovereignty in Europe and how businesses can adopt AI while maintaining independence from US cloud providers.

AI deployment is inextricably linked to the United States of America. Many of the major frontier labs are based there and the cloud providers that businesses depend on to access the latest models are majority American. But all over Europe, businesses are considering questioning the extent to which their critical workloads should be dependent on the US. In a recent edition of the podcast, we covered all things digital sovereignty. In this episode, we're zooming in on how this push for sovereignty is compatible with AI adoption for European businesses. What does ‘AI sovereignty’ mean in practical terms? And how can businesses isolate workloads from the wider world without falling behind? In this episode, Rory speaks to In today’s episode, I’m joined by René Büst, senior director, analyst in Gartner's Emerging Market Dynamics practice, to explore how European CIOs can balance sovereignty, agility, and compliance. Read more: Can the UK achieve AI sovereignty? EU businesses will flock to ‘region-specific’ AI platforms by 2027 – but cost could be a major hurdle Will the future of AI be made in Europe? The EU thinks so The second enforcement deadline for the EU AI Act is approaching –…

People in this episode

Host: Rory

Guest: René Büst

Topics covered

  • AI sovereignty
  • European businesses
  • cloud providers
  • digital sovereignty
  • CIO strategies
  • compliance
  • agility

Keywords

  • AI sovereignty
  • European businesses
  • cloud sovereignty
  • digital sovereignty
  • CIO
  • Gartner
  • EU AI Act
  • compliance
  • agility

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gartner, AWS, Google, Microsoft

Places: Europe, UK

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