Dr Gregor Tkachov, Lecturer on the College of Pc Science at Berlin College of Enterprise & Innovation, discusses the significance of digital sovereignty for Europe and emphasises the efforts to develop European digital infrastructure.
A digital infrastructure is a socially built-in know-how framework essential to ship digital items, merchandise, and companies.
It permits the related enterprise to function, develop, innovate, and reply to buyer demand.
The spectacular rise of the platform economic system wouldn’t have been attainable with out digital infrastructures.
This contribution highlights digital know-how and innovation developments in Europe within the gentle of an ongoing discourse on European digital sovereignty.
Platform economic system
In an effort to stay aggressive, a rising variety of companies are shifting in the direction of the platform enterprise mannequin and its digital methods.
The objective is to facilitate digital interactions between prospects and distributors.
On-line networks created by such firms as Amazon, eBay, Google, Uber, Reserving, Expedia, and Airbnb are just some examples of the important parts of contemporary digital infrastructures.
Applied sciences for accumulating, processing, and exchanging consumer knowledge have turn into of main significance for such enterprises. However how autonomous are the market, financial, and, extra usually, social actors of their decision-making within the digital world?
Digital sovereignty
The notion of digital sovereignty refers back to the capability to behave independently in all points of digital transformation.
In Europe, the problem of digital sovereignty has emerged because of the rising dominance of non-European actors within the platform economic system.
The controversy over the COVID-19 contact tracing apps has fuelled the hunt for European digital sovereignty. The technological selections made by Apple and Google have undermined the flexibility of European international locations to design their very own contact-tracing options (corresponding to ‘Cease Covid’ in France).
One other rising concern for European international locations is their lack of management over knowledge produced on their very own territory, making it arduous for them to compete in new and progressive markets.
Cloud know-how
One of many first measures to strengthen their digital sovereignty, European governments have began to maneuver away from cloud options for companies supplied by international firms and to as an alternative deploy European-designed options.
The launch of Nextcloud is a living proof.1 The hub defines itself as ‘the industry-leading, totally open-source, on-premises content material collaboration platform’ on which groups can entry, share, and handle their knowledge throughout cellular, desktop, and net interfaces.
In December 2023, Nextcloud Hub reached a complete of 100 group members, spanning over 20 international locations.
Microchip know-how
Digital sovereignty additionally encompasses the flexibility to behave strategically and autonomously within the supplies know-how sector. This pertains, within the first place, to the manufacturing of solid-state batteries for e-mobility and semiconductor chips.
Right here, the main target can be on semiconductor supplies, as that is the premise for {hardware} elements of digital infrastructures.
Semiconductors are chemical parts with versatile electrical properties rooted within the legal guidelines of quantum mechanics. As a result of this reality, semiconductor supplies, corresponding to silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide and many others., are indispensable for industrial manufacturing of transistors – digital units that implement digital logic in microchips.
From smartphones and notebooks by means of essential infrastructures for telecommunications, healthcare, vitality, and defence, to industrial automation, semiconductor supplies are central to the trendy digital economic system.
Recognising the necessity for a typical European technique within the semiconductor know-how sector, in February 2022, the European Fee launched the European Chips Act.2
It said: “Latest world semiconductors shortages pressured manufacturing unit closures in a variety of sectors from automobiles to healthcare units. Within the automobile sector, for instance, manufacturing in some Member States decreased by one-third in 2021. This made extra evident the acute world dependency of the semiconductor worth chain on a really restricted variety of actors in a fancy geopolitical context. But it surely additionally illustrated the significance of semiconductors for all the European {industry} and society.”
Via its Chips Act, which entered into drive in September 2023, the EU goals to double its present market share to safe 20% of the worldwide market in 2030.3
In an effort to obtain this objective, the Member States are anticipated to take a position €3.3bn of EU funds in a sequence of improvements such because the organising of superior pilot manufacturing strains, the event of a cloud-based design platform, the organisation of competence centres, the institution of a Chips Fund, and the manufacturing of quantum chips.
The quantum development
The deliberate investments in quantum chips acknowledge the cutting-edge of quantum computing: it’s now not a science venture, however moderately an industrial one.
From government-backed funding to developments by main producers (corresponding to IBM), 2023 was the yr through which the brand new computing paradigm entered the typical particular person’s lexicon.
Whereas the general-purpose quantum pc continues to be underway, a few of its particular fashions have already proved environment friendly in fixing advanced issues with a number of interplay patterns.
As quantum computer systems are an exponential know-how, they’re sure to surpass their classical counterparts.
The development towards the rise of quantum computer systems will proceed in 2024.
Specifically, we’re prone to witness a surge of efforts specializing in quantum-resistant cryptography within the context of safe knowledge transmission in digital infrastructures.
References
- Nextcloud Hub (2024) Out there at: https://nextcloud.com (Accessed: 1 February 2024).
- Digital sovereignty: Fee proposes Chips Act to confront semiconductor shortages and strengthen Europe’s technological management (2022) Out there at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_729 (Accessed: 2 February 2024).
- Digital sovereignty: European Chips Act enters into drive at present (2023) Out there at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4518 (Accessed: 2 February 2024).
