Airbus and others call for sovereign infrastructure fund, buy European

Foo Yun Chee

Sun, Mar 16, 2025, 10:08 PM 1 min read

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Airbus, Dassault Systemes and much than 90 smaller European exertion companies and lobby groups person urged European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to make a sovereign infrastructure money to ramp up nationalist investments successful cutting-edge technologies.

The companies and groups said caller U.S. and EU developments and U.S. measures underscored the urgency of Europe taking measures to support its strategical autonomy successful cardinal sectors.

"Europe needs to retrieve the initiative, and go much technologically autarkic crossed each layers of its captious integer infrastructure, from logical infrastructure - applications, platforms, media, AI frameworks and models - to carnal infrastructure - chips, computing, retention and connectivity," they said successful an unfastened missive dated March 14 seen by Reuters.

"Europe's existent aggregate dependencies make information and reliability risks, compromise our sovereignty and wounded our growth," they said.

The missive said a sovereign infrastructure money was cardinal to financing specified an ambitious goal, particularly successful the capital-intensive parts of the worth concatenation specified arsenic quantum technologies and chips.

The missive besides projected that governments follow a "buy European" argumentation successful procurement tenders to drum up request and promote businesses to invest.

"The purpose is not to exclude non-European players, but to make abstraction wherever European suppliers tin legitimately vie (and warrant investment)," it said.

Signatories to the missive see French unreality services supplier OVH Cloud and its peers successful different EU countries, the European Software Institute, European Startup Network, German AI Association, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) and French nationalist concern slope BPI France.

The missive was besides addressed to EU tech main Henna Virkkunen.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Holmes)