European AI sovereignty and regulation
What sovereign AI means in practice. European cloud and AI sovereignty, the EU AI Act, the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, data residency and the legal reach of US providers, with the filings and court documents behind each claim.
26 articles. Last updated October 15, 2026.
European AI sovereignty and regulation: articles
October 15, 2026
Ticking Boxes, Shipping ModelsDoctolib ticks the health-data compliance boxes with US clouds and models. For now, its public promises say more than its documents show.
September 24, 2026
Vent MauvaisVerlaine's ill wind carries the leaf where it will. States bought Mistral without a tender; where free choice can be measured, it goes elsewhere.
August 4, 2026
You Have To Ask Me NicelyOVH told Canada how to get the data it refused to hand over. On August 18, the European Union stops making the argument OVH is making in court.
June 28, 2026
Too Dangerous for You, Free for EveryoneAmerica locked up its best models. Europe regulates a frontier it can't build. China gives its best to the world and is winning.
June 22, 2026
Two Laws, One DependenceEurope moved twice on cloud sovereignty this month. One proposal makes the American duopoly easier to move within.
June 18, 2026
Independent or CurrentEurope built the most ambitious AI enforcer in the world. It still has to ask the labs how to grade them.
June 3, 2026
The Amendments Were WhisperedA deputy in the president's own party admitted who wrote his amendments. The moat just confessed.
May 22, 2026
Lobby, Levy, LegislateHow Mistral is trying to convert a perishable contact list into permanent law. On May 12, in a near-empty hearing room of the French National Assembly, Arthur…
April 30, 2026
Simplify Up, Enforce DownThe EU spent five months simplifying the AI Act for the companies it can reach. Last night, after twelve hours, those negotiations failed.
April 29, 2026
More Sovereign, Different Stack: The Builder TaxSovereignty forces a different stack. The Commission's framework prices neither the cost nor the exit it delivers.
April 22, 2026
Ten Percent SovereignThe European Commission awarded €180 million under a framework that scores legal sovereignty at ten percent, and didn't see what an Ontario court had just done.
March 27, 2026
Build, Regulate, ScareOn March 17, the Innovation Makers Alliance played an AI-generated fake newscast to an amphitheatre at Station F.[1] IMA is a consortium of the CIOs, CDOs, and innovation directors at three-quarter...
March 20, 2026
Every Country Needs Sovereign AI. Jensen Is Selling It.On March 16, Jensen Huang stood on the GTC stage in San Jose and showed the audience a map. Dozens of countries. More than 1 million Nvidia GPUs are deployed worldwide through the company's cloud p...
March 12, 2026
Register, Disclose, PayOn the morning of March 10, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union convened its fifteen-judge Grand Chamber in Luxembourg to hear oral arguments in Like Company v. Google, the first case t...
March 10, 2026
Mistral Succeeded. France's AI Strategy Didn't.In the winter of 1972, in a cellar in Châtenay-Malabry, a suburb south of Paris, an engineer named François Gernelle worked eighteen-hour days to meet a deadline from the Institut National de Reche...
March 7, 2026
Access, Disable, DestroyOn March 1, 2026, Iranian drones struck three AWS data centers in the Gulf, knocking Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank offline for two days and degrading 109 cloud services across the UAE and Bahrain.[1] F...
March 2, 2026
Data Residency Is a Blast RadiusOn March 1, 2026, an unidentified object (ahem) struck an AWS availability zone, a cluster of data centers, in the United Arab Emirates, setting it on fire. The fire department cut power. A secon...
February 26, 2026
Two Sovereign Clouds, One Legal WallOn June 10, 2025, a Tuesday morning in the French Senate, Anton Carniaux sat under oath. Carniaux, Microsoft France'sdirecteur des affaires publiques et juridiques, had been summoned before thecomm..
February 19, 2026
The EU Parliament just disabled AI on its own devices.The European Parliament just disabled built-in AI features on all lawmakers' and staff devices, tablets, phones, the works. Writing assistants, text summarizers, virtual assistants: all gone.
February 9, 2026
AI Regulation or AI Requiem? Part 4In the past few weeks alone, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.6, which includes a million-token context and autonomous agent teams. OpenAI launched a desktop Codex app that manages fleets of coding ...
February 3, 2026
The EU Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA): A Last Shot at Cloud Sovereignty, or Another Expensive Debacle?The European Commission is expected to propose the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) in Q1 2026. If you work in European tech, cloud, or AI, this will affect you.
January 19, 2026
AI Sovereignty in Europe: A Decision FrameworkEuropean enterprises face a false choice: sovereignty or capability. This framing is wrong and costly. Most sovereignty requirements can be satisfied today with US hyperscaler infrastructure. The q...
December 4, 2025
The Sovereignty Mirage: Why European Clouds Won't Save Your DataIf you've been sleeping soundly, confident that hosting your precious European data with a French cloud provider keeps it safely tucked away from foreign intelligence agencies, I have uncomfortable..
November 24, 2025
AI Regulation or AI Requiem? Part 3In the span of 48 hours, Europe's AI delusion has gone from tragedy to farce, and the mask has finally slipped.
November 22, 2025
AI Regulation or AI Requiem? Part 2Remember when I called the EU AI Act a self-inflicted wound that would turn Europe into a digital colony? Well, the Commission just proved me right by proposing to delay high-risk AI obligations by...
January 20, 2025
AI Regulation or AI Requiem?A critical analysis of the contrasting approaches to AI regulation between Europe and America, and their implications for the future of AI development.
About the author
Julien Simon is an AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. He was VP and Chief Evangelist at Arcee AI, Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face and Global Evangelist for AI and machine learning at AWS, and wrote “Learn Amazon SageMaker” (Packt). He has given 693+ talks in 37 countries and published 502+ technical articles. See his experience and Wikidata entry.
Method: figures come from filings, court documents, vendor documentation and measurements I ran, and each piece dates its numbers.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Who writes about European AI sovereignty, cloud sovereignty and AI regulation?
- Julien Simon covers european ai sovereignty and regulation in 26 articles on julien.org. The newest articles are "Ticking Boxes, Shipping Models" (October 15, 2026); "Vent Mauvais" (September 24, 2026); "You Have To Ask Me Nicely" (August 4, 2026). What sovereign AI means in practice. European cloud and AI sovereignty, the EU AI Act, the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, data residency and the legal reach of US providers, with the filings and court documents behind each claim.
- Where are Julien Simon's pieces on european ai sovereignty and regulation published?
- Articles appear first in The AI Realist newsletter (airealist.ai) and are archived on julien.org. Videos are on the YouTube channel @juliensimonfr, each with a full transcript on julien.org.