Input to the Call for Evidence for the Cloud and AI Development Act
A sustainable and resilient sovereign cloud and edge capacity Europe is a crucial asset to enable Europe’s competitiveness in a globalised market economy. Especially in times of increasing uncertainty, ensuring the EU’s technological and economic sovereignty should be a top priority.
Connect Europe welcomes the opportunity to submit feedback to the European Commission’s call for evidence for the Cloud and AI Development Act.
Cloud is the foundation of digital innovation and a key enabler for AI, providing the infrastructure and computing power essential for its rapid progress. Yet, Connect Europe stresses the existing gap between available computational capacity and the growing needs, particularly in accommodating the demand from AI technologies. In 2024, it is estimated that a total of 2 257 edge nodes were deployed across the EU2. This falls far short of the EU’s ambitious target to deploy 10.000 climate-neutral and highly secure edge nodes by 2030, highlighting the significant collective effort still required.
For the European telecom industry, cloud and edge cloud increasingly offer an important business opportunity through the provision of cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and AI and data processing, among other applications. However, operators are facing significant challenges—such as excessive regulation, a fragmented regulatory landscape, and limited opportunities to scale—which hinder their ability to develop, deploy, and operate state-of-the-art cloud and AI services. These services are essential for unlocking Europe's untapped innovation potential across both private and public sectors.
To address these challenges, the EU must prioritise policy reforms to incentivise investment, support European industry enablers such as telecommunication providers in developing sovereign cloud solutions, and leverage public procurement to boost such European alternatives. Initiatives like IPCEI CIS are vital and should continue with new European projects but must be matched with complementary actions which make Europe a more attractive place to invest privately, by regulatory simplification, boosting entrepreneurship and talent acquisition.
Key recommendations of the following submission:
• Introduce demand-side measures: strengthen demand for EU cloud solutions through uptake targets for public procurement of cloud services
• Establish data and cloud sovereignty: need to promote trusted European cloud services for critical use cases.
• Ensure financing: need to improve current ongoing programmes. Strengthen the investment capacity and scalability of key enabling sectors, such as telecoms, through facilitating measures such as pro-investment regulatory simplification.
• Facilitate the necessary digital infrastructure: need to improve conditions to deploy edge-cloud infrastructure.
