BERLIN — Germany has swung behind a push from France to make Europe more reliant on its own technology companies, as the bloc’s two powerhouses come together for a meaningful effort to wean the bloc off American giants.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday acknowledged France may have a point in its years-long push to reduce dependence on American companies, just hours after an outage by a U.S. cloud computing company provided a timely reminder of the potential vulnerabilities.

“We want to speak with one European voice, and we work together toward one goal: that is European digital sovereignty,” Merz told an audience at a joint summit in Berlin, days after admitting he was warming up to what he previously considered “more of a French concept.”

Recent outages from major U.S. cloud providers as well as massive shortages in the chip industry “showed us that we are dependent on digital technologies from China and the U.S.,” and “these dependencies are being used for power politics,” Merz said.

Sharing the stage, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “Europe doesn’t want to be the client of the big entrepreneurs, or the big solutions, either from the U.S. or China.”

As the two leaders openly warned of the “costs” of digital dependency, their words illustrated a remarkable convergence in an area that has long seen markedly divergent approaches. In Paris, sovereignty has been about forcefully prioritizing local champions and breaking reliance on the U.S., while Berlin has focused on boosting innovation without severing important trade ties.

As the sheer dominance of American tech giants raises genuine questions about how Europe can achieve sovereignty in a meaningful way, the two countries used the Berlin event to outline a host of initiatives they argue will move the needle.

That included promises to move forward with earmarking European solutions for public technology contracts, keeping European data fully shielded from foreign snooping — and even confronting abusive dominance by major U.S. cloud providers.

In perhaps the most explosive move of the day, France and Germany backed a call from Brussels to bring the largest cloud computing players, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, within the scope of its landmark antitrust regulation. The EU also announced parallel investigations into the two services that could serve as a direct hit on the U.S. titans.

On a day when one of a host of recent cloud outages — this time from U.S. company Cloudflare — saw ubiquitous sites, including ChatGPT and X, go down, the timing was striking.

As well as pushing Brussels on U.S. dominance in the cloud, Macron and Merz also both voiced strong hopes that an effort coming Wednesday to cut red tape in the EU’s digital rulebook — including an expected delay to the bloc’s landmark AI Act — will help Europe stay competitive.

“If we let the Americans and the Chinese have all of the champions, one thing is certain: we may have the best regulation in the world, but we won’t be regulating anything,” said Macron.

The summit was accompanied by a host of business tie-ups — including a significant partnership between the French AI star Mistral and German software company SAP to build “Europe’s first fully sovereign AI stack.”

Both the French and German governments also promised to use the solutions that the partnership produces, over those from U.S. tech giants.

Work to do

Despite the strong show of unity from Macron and Merz, the bloc’s powerhouses acknowledged they still need to iron out some details.

The two countries announced a new “working group” to define what digital sovereignty means in areas such as public procurement contracts, as the European Commission starts to draw up a legislative update that could drive a shift away from foreign-owned technology.

“We need a uniform set of criteria in the EU that defines what sovereignty really means,” Austrian Digital Secretary of State Alexander Pröll said in an interview, echoing repeated demands among EU countries meeting in Brussels.

Austria successfully spearheaded an effort to have member countries rally behind a side declaration calling to boost Europe’s digital sovereignty “in an open manner” — a phrasing that has historically been used to show any move on independence won’t isolate the U.S.

France’s Digital Minister Anne Le Hénanff also acknowledged some lingering divergences with her counterpart in Berlin, Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger, that the working group will tackle — particularly on the issue of public procurement — which she identified as something Wildberger doesn’t “openly embrace, at least not to the same extent.”

She later told reporters that she attributed this caution to not having the “same relationship” with international partners.

Germany is keen to pursue tech independence that still supports a spirit of “friendship” with the U.S., Wildberger said in an interview.

Yet for many at the summit — who saw the fact that it even took place as a positive signal in itself — the day’s proceedings offered a promising glimpse of Europe’s digital future.

“This is a decisive moment for Europe when we decide to be players, not just watching the game,” said Gonçalo Matias, Portugal’s minister for state reform.

It’s important that “we talk in the same language,” said Denmark’s Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen, while cautioning that change shouldn’t take too long.

Pieter Haeck contributed to this report.