Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.
The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:
This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.
The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.
AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.
The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.
But the real story is how this happened...
On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.
Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.
Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.
It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.
Then Trump accelerated the divorce.
January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.
The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.
Europe heard every word of it.
On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.
And the response came fast:
April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.
Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.
- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030
None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.
The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.
Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.
And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...
@Tendar Ich denke, für die russische Föderation kommt es noch schlimmer. Sie wird wie die UDSSR zerfallen. Die Republiken wollen den Zar & seine Gehülfen in Moskau nicht mehr mit Milliarden füttern. Derweil sie in Armut versinken.
США хочуть від нас отримати ліцензії на виробництво БПЛА + інтелектуальні права + випробування на території США в рамках "дронової угоди".
А більше їм нічого не хочеться?
Вони у перший же день почнуть виробництво "своїх" дронів, а нам скажуть - вимбачте, угода неактуальна.
Знаємо такі приколи. Тому ні. Жодної передачі інтелектуальних прав в принципі, жодних випробувань до підписання угоди, а виробництво - під наглядом наших спеціалістів та за обмеженимиліцензіями. ��а будь-яке порушення - аннулювання ліцензій. Тільки так.
Взамін - передача нам ліцензій на виробництво перехоплювачів РАС-2 та РАС-3 до комплексу "Петріот".
США зараз не в тому стані, щоб диктувати нам умови😉
У Трампа немає козирів.
@ylecun@Noahpinion Why do people constantly mix up human intelligence with algorithmic intelligence? Ladder is useful - indeed - but it is super bulky, needs endless energy and can’t handle the hundred thousand signals our brain can handle 3D every second easily.
@B_Unternaehrer Das ist verständlich, aber vergeblich. In den USA werden grad die white-collar entry Jobs wegrationalisiert. Der klassischen Karriereleiter fehlen zunehmend die unteren Sprossen. Auch meinen Studies sage ich „embrace the change!“.
https://t.co/Wbu2va5xUQ
2/3 dieses für die Zukunft wichtigen Deeptech Clusters liegen in der Schweiz. Und wir sind drauf und dran, die besten Wissenschaftler und Unternehmer auszuschliessen. 🤦♂️
Alpine Tech Corridor is the undisputed deeptech capital of continental Europe. 🏔️
The data from the European Deeptech Report 2026:
→ The Lausanne-Zürich-Munich axis is the #1 deeptech cluster in continental Europe
→ Switzerland + Munich invested close to €16bn into deeptech in the last 5 years
→ ETH Zürich, EPFL and TUM are ranked #1, #3 and #4 in deeptech spinout value creation in Europe
→ Together they produced 340 VC-backed spinouts — 45% of the total across all top 10 European universities → 12 out of 31 European deeptech unicorns came from these three institutions alone
→ The top 6 universities raised €23.1bn in VC — ETH, EPFL and TUM account for 47% of that. After Oxford, Bristol and Cambridge, the drop-off is massive.
Paris ranks high, but almost entirely because of Mistral.
It is the product of 150 years of precision engineering culture, world-class technical universities and a deep industrial base that gives deeptech companies real customers on their doorstep.
It looks like Europe has a deeptech supercluster! 🧪
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@Mylovanov Here in Switzerland we observe this cyber-threading carefully. Digital sovereignty becomes more and more attention. There’s a growing organization from public authorities and the private SW-industry:
https://t.co/56jQKeH9d2
@zumbach_a@AtticusJazz Es genügt nicht, den Titel zu kopieren. Man sollte den Artikel auch lesen. Der Zuger Kantonsrat hat über ein grundpfandgesichertes Darlehen an die ISZL beraten und genehmigt. Dieses ist innert 20 Jahren zurück zu zahlen.