Narendra Modi presented the new MANAV Vision during the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, setting out a human-centred direction for AI.
He described the framework as rooted in moral guidance, transparent oversight, national control of data, inclusive access and lawful verification. He argued that the approach is intended to guide global AI governance for the benefit of humanity.
The Prime Minister of India warned that rapid technological change requires stronger safeguards and drew attention to the need to protect children. He also said societies are entering a period where people and intelligent systems co-create and evolve together instead of functioning in separate spheres.
He pointed to India’s confidence in its talent and policy clarity as evidence of a growing AI future.
Modi announced that three domestic companies introduced new AI models and applications during the summit, saying the launches reflect the energy and capability of India’s young innovators.
He invited technology leaders from around the world to collaborate by designing and developing in India instead of limiting innovation to established hubs elsewhere.
The summit brought together policymakers, academics, technologists and civil society representatives to encourage cooperation on the societal impact of artificial intelligence.
As the first global AI summit held in the Global South, the gathering aligned with India’s national commitment to welfare for all and the wider aspiration to advance AI for humanity.
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The European Commission has proposed changes to the GDPR and the EU AI Act as part of its Digital Omnibus Package, seeking to clarify how personal data may be processed for AI development and operation across the EU.
A new provision would recognise AI development and operation as a potential legitimate interest under the GDPR, subject to necessity and a balancing test. Controllers in the EU would still need to demonstrate safeguards, including data minimisation, transparency and an unconditional right to object.
The package also introduces a proposed legal ground for processing sensitive data in AI systems where removal is not feasible without disproportionate effort. Claims that strict conditions would apply, requiring technical protections and documentation throughout the lifecycle of AI models in the EU.
Further amendments would permit biometric data processing for identity verification under defined conditions and expand the rules allowing sensitive data to be used for bias detection beyond high-risk AI systems.
Overall, the proposals aim to provide greater legal certainty without overturning existing data protection principles. The EU lawmakers and supervisory authorities continue to debate the proposals before any final adoption.
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Derived from the Latin word ‘superanus’, through the French word ‘souveraineté’, sovereignty can be understood as: ‘the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state and in the maintenance of order’ – Britannica. Digital sovereignty, specifically European digital sovereignty, refers to ‘Europe’s ability to act independently in the digital world’.
In 2020, the European Parliament already identified the consequences of reliance on non-EU technologies. From the economic and social influence of non-EU technology companies, which can undermine user control over their personal data, to the slow growth of the EU technology companies and a limitation on the enforcement of European laws.
Today, these concerns persist. From Romanian election interference on TikTok’s platform, Microsoft’s interference with the ICC, to the Dutch government authentication platform being acquired by a US firm, and booming American and Chinese LLMs compared to European LLMs. The EU is at a crossroads between international reliance and homegrown adoption.
The issue of the EU digital sovereignty has gained momentum in the context of recent and significant shifts in US foreign policy toward its allies. In this environment, the pursuit of the EU digital sovereignty appears as a justified and proportionate response, one that might previously have been perceived as unnecessarily confrontational.
In light of this, this analysis’s main points will discuss the rationale behind the EU digital sovereignty (including dependency, innovation and effective compliance), recent European-centric technological and platform shifts, the steps the EU is taking to successfully be digitally sovereign and finally, examples of European alternatives
Rationale behind the move
The reasons for digital sovereignty can be summed up in three main areas: (I) less dependency on non-EU tech, (ii) leading and innovating technological solutions, and (iii) ensuring better enforcement and subsequent adherence to data protection laws/fundamental rights.
(i) Less dependency: Global geopolitical tensions between US-China/Russia push Europe towards developing its own digital capabilities and secure its supply chains. Insecure supply chain makes Europe vulnerable to failing energy grids.
More recently, US giant Microsoft threatened the International legal order by revoking US-sanctioned International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s Microsoft software access, preventing the Chief Prosecutor from working on his duties at the ICC. In light of these scenarios, Europeans are turning to developing more European-based solutions to reduce upstream dependencies.
(ii) Leaders & innovators: A common argument is that Americans innovate, the Chinese copy, and the Europeans regulate. If the EU aims to be a digital geopolitical player, it must position itself to be a regulator which promotes innovation. It can achieve this by upskilling its workforce of non-digital trades into digital ones to transform its workforce, have more EU digital infrastructure (data centres, cloud storage and management software), further increase innovation spending and create laws that truly allow for the uptake of EU technological development instead of relying on alternative, cheaper non-EU options.
(iii) Effective compliance: Knowing that fines are more difficult to enforce towards non-EU companies than the EU companies (ex., Clearview AI), EU-based technological organisations would allow for corrective measures, warnings, and fines to be enforced more effectively. Thus, enabling more adherence towards the EU’s digital agenda and respect for fundamental rights.
Can the EU achieve Digital Sovereignty?
The main speed bumps towards the EU digital sovereignty are: i) a lack of digital infrastructure (cloud storage & data centres), ii) (critical) raw material dependency and iii) Legislative initiatives to facilitate the path towards digital sovereignty (innovation procurement and fragmented compliance regime).
i) lack of digital infrastructure: In order for the EU to become digitally sovereign it must have its own sovereign digital infrastructure.
In practice, the EU relies heavily on American data centre providers (i.e. Equinix, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services) hosted in the EU. In this case, even though the data is European and hosted in the EU, the company that hosts it is non-European. This poses reliance and legislative challenges, such as ensuring adequate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data when it is in transit to the US. Given the EU-US DPF, there is a legal basis for transferring EU personal data to the US.
However, if the DPF were to be struck down (perhaps due to the US’ Cloud Act), as it has been in the past (twice with Schrems I and Schrems II) and potentially Schrems III, there would no longer be a legal basis for the transfer of the EU personal data to a US data centre.
Previously, the EU’s 2022 Directive on critical entities resilience allowed for the EU countries to identify critical infrastructure and subsequently ensure they take the technical, security and organisational measures to assure their resilience. Part of this Directive covers digital infrastructure, including providers of cloud computing services and providers of data centres. From this, the EU has recently developed guidelines for member states to identify critical entities. However, these guidelines do not anticipate how to achieve resilience and leave this responsibility with member states.
ii) Raw material dependency: The EU cannot be digitally sovereign until it reduces some of its dependencies on other countries’ raw materials to build the hardware necessary to be technologically sovereign. In 2025, the EU’s goals were to create a new roadmap towards critical raw material (CRM) sovereignty to rely on its own energy sources and build infrastructure.
Thus, the RESourceEU Action Plan was born in December 2025. This plan contains 6 pillars: securing supply through knowledge, accelerating and promoting projects, using the circular economy and fostering innovation (recycling products which contain CRMs), increasing European demand for European projects (stockpiling CRMs), protecting the single market and partnering with third countries for long-lasting diversification. Practically speaking, part of this plan is to match Europe and or global raw material supply with European demand for European projects.
iii) Legislative initiatives to facilitate the path towards digital sovereignty:
Tackling difficult innovation procurement: the argument is to facilitate its uptake of innovation procurement across the EU. In 2026, the EU is set to reform its public procurement framework for innovation. The Innovation Procurement Update (IPU) team has representatives from over 33 countries (predominantly through law firms, Bird & Bird being the most represented), which recommends that innovation procurement reach 20% of all public procurement.
Another recommendation would help more costly innovative solutions to be awarded procurement projects, which in the past were awarded to cheaper procurement bids. In practice, the lowest price of a public procurement bid is preferred, and if it meets the remaining procurement conditions, it wins the bid – but de-prioritising this non-pricing criterion would enable companies with more costly innovative solutions to win public procurement bids.
Alleviating compliance challenges: lowering other compliance burdens whilst maintaining the digital aquis: recently announced at the World Economic Forum by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, EU.inc would help cross-border business operations scaling up by alleviating company, corporate, insolvency, labour and taxation law compliance burdens. By harmonising these into a single framework, businesses can more easily grow and deploy cross-border solutions that would otherwise face hurdles.
Power through data: another legislative measure to help facilitate the path towards the EU digital sovereignty is unlocking the potential behind European data. In order to research innovative solutions, data is required. This can be achieved through personal or non-personal data. The EU’s GDPR regulates personal data and is currently undergoing amendments. If the proposed changes to the GDPR are approved, i.e. a broadening of its scope, data that used to be considered personal (and thus required GDPR compliance) could be deemed non-personal and used more freely for research purposes. The Data Act regulate the reuse and re-sharing of non-personal data. It aims to simplify and bolster the fair reuse of non-personal data. Overall, both personal and non-personal data can give important insight that research can benefit from in developing European innovative sovereign solutions.
European alternatives
European companies have already built a network of European platforms, services and apps with European values at heart:
Category
Currently Used
EU Alternative
Comments
Social media
TikTok, X, Instagram
Monnet (Luxembourg)
‘W’ (Sweden)
Monnet is a social media app prioritises connections and non-addictive scrolling. Recently announced ‘W’ replaces ‘X’ and is gaining major traction with non-advertising models at its heart.
Email
Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s gmail
Tuta (mail/calendar), Proton (Germany), Mailbox (Germany), Mailfence (Belgium)
Replace email and calendar apps with a privacy focused business model.
Search engine
Google Search and DuckDuckGo
Qwant (France) and Ecosia (German)
Qwant has focused on privacy since its launch in 2013. Ecosia is an ecofriendly focused business model which helps plant trees when users search
Video conferencing
Microsoft Teams and Slack a
Visio (France), Wire (Switzerland, Mattermost (US but self hosted), Stackfield (Germany), Nextcloud Talk (Germany) and Threema (Switzerland)
These alternatives are end-to-end encrypted. Visio is used by the French Government
Writing tools
Microsoft’s Word & Excel and Google Sheets, Notion
Most of these options provide cloud storage and NexCloud is a recurring alternative across categories.
Finance
Visa and Mastercard
Wero (EU)
Not only will it provide an EU wide digital wallet option, but it will replace existing national options – providing for fast adoption.
LLM
OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek’s LLM
Mistral AI (France) and DeepL (Germany)
DeepL is already wildly used and Mistral is more transparent with its partially open-source model and ease of reuse for developers
Hardware
Semi conductors: ASML (Dutch) Data Center: GAIA-X (Belgium)
ASML is a chip powerhouse for the EU and GAIA-X set an example of EU based data centres with it open-source federated data infrastructure.
A dedicated website called ‘European Alternatives’ provides exactly what it says, European Alternatives. A list with over 50 categories and 100 alternatives
Conclusion
In recent years, the Union’s policy goals have shifted towards overt digital sovereignty solutions through diversification of materials and increased innovation spending, combined with a restructuring of the legislative framework to create the necessary path towards European digital infrastructure.
Whilst this analysis does not include all speed bumps, nor avenues towards the road of the EU digital sovereignty, it sheds light on the EU’s most recent major policy developments. Key questions remain regarding data reuse, its impact on data protection fundamental rights and whether this reshaping of the framework will yield the intended results.
Therefore, how will the EU tread whilst it becomes a more coherent sovereign geopolitical player?
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The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the tablets it provides to lawmakers, citing cybersecurity and data protection concerns. Built-in AI tools like writing and virtual assistants have been disabled, while third-party apps remain mostly unaffected.
The decision follows an assessment highlighting that some AI features send data to cloud services rather than processing it locally.
Lawmakers have been advised to take similar precautions on their personal devices. Guidance includes reviewing AI settings, disabling unnecessary features, and limiting app permissions to reduce exposure of work emails and documents.
Officials stressed that these measures are intended to prevent sensitive data from being inadvertently shared with service providers.
The move comes amid broader European scrutiny of reliance on overseas digital platforms, particularly US-based services. Concerns over data sovereignty and laws like the US Cloud Act have amplified fears that personal and sensitive information could be accessed by foreign authorities.
AI tools, which require extensive access to user data, have become a key focus in ongoing debates over digital security in the EU.
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Meta announced a multiyear partnership with NVIDIA to build large-scale AI infrastructure across on-premises and cloud systems. Plans include hyperscale data centres designed for both training and inference workloads, forming a core part of the company’s long-term AI roadmap.
Deployment will include millions of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, plus expanded use of NVIDIA CPUs and Spectrum-X networking. According to Mark Zuckerberg, the collaboration is intended to support advanced AI systems and broaden access to high-performance computing capabilities worldwide.
Jensen Huang highlighted the scale of Meta’s AI operations and the role of deep hardware-software integration in improving performance.
Efficiency gains remain a central objective, with Meta increasing the rollout of Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPUs to improve performance per watt in data centres. Future Vera CPU deployment is being considered to expand energy-efficient computing later in the decade.
Privacy-focused AI development forms another pillar of the partnership. NVIDIA Confidential Computing will first power secure AI features on WhatsApp, with plans to expand across more services as Meta scales AI to billions of users.
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Concerns over privacy safeguards have resurfaced as the European Data Protection Supervisor urges legislators to limit indiscriminate chat-scanning in the upcoming extension of temporary EU rules.
The supervisor warns that the current framework risks enabling broad surveillance instead of focusing on targeted action against criminal content.
The EU institutions are considering a short-term renewal of the interim regime governing the detection of online material linked to child protection.
Privacy officials argue that such measures need clearer boundaries and stronger oversight to ensure that automated scanning tools do not intrude on the communications of ordinary users.
EDPS is also pressing lawmakers to introduce explicit safeguards before any renewal is approved. These include tighter definitions of scanning methods, independent verification, and mechanisms that prevent the processing of unrelated personal data.
According to the supervisor, temporary legislation must not create long-term precedents that weaken confidentiality across messaging services.
The debate comes as the EU continues discussions on a wider regulatory package covering child-protection technologies, encryption and platform responsibilities.
Privacy authorities maintain that targeted tools can be more practical than blanket scanning, which they consider a disproportionate response.
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Mistral AI has strengthened its position in Europe’s AI sector through the acquisition of Koyeb. The deal forms part of its strategy to build end-to-end capacity for deploying advanced AI systems across European infrastructure.
The company has been expanding beyond model development into large-scale computing. It is currently building new data centre facilities, including a primary site in France and a €1.2 billion facility in Sweden, both aimed at supporting high-performance AI workloads.
The acquisition follows a period of rapid growth for Mistral AI, which reached a valuation of €11.7 billion after investment from ASML. French public support has also played a role in accelerating its commercial and research progress.
Mistral AI now positions itself as a potential European technology champion, seeking to combine model development, compute infrastructure and deployment tools into a fully integrated AI ecosystem.
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The cost of running AI systems is shifting towards memory rather than compute, as the price of DRAM has risen sharply over the past year. Efficient memory orchestration is now becoming a critical factor in keeping inference costs under control, particularly for large-scale deployments.
Analysts such as Doug O’Laughlin and Val Bercovici of Weka note that prompt caching is turning into a complex field.
Anthropic has expanded its caching guidance for Claude, with detailed tiers that determine how long data remains hot and how much can be saved through careful planning. The structure enables significant efficiency gains, though each additional token can displace previously cached content.
The growing complexity reflects a broader shift in AI architecture. Memory is being treated as a valuable and scarce resource, with optimisation required at multiple layers of the stack.
Startups such as Tensormesh are already working on cache optimisation tools, while hyperscalers are examining how best to balance DRAM and high-bandwidth memory across their data centres.
Better orchestration should reduce the number of tokens required for queries, and models are becoming more efficient at processing those tokens. As costs fall, applications that are currently uneconomical may become commercially viable.
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Leading Chinese AI developers have unveiled a series of advanced models ahead of the Lunar New Year, strengthening the country’s position in the global AI sector.
Major firms such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu AI introduced new systems designed to support more sophisticated agents, faster workflows and broader multimedia understanding.
Industry observers also expect an imminent release from DeepSeek, whose previous model disrupted global markets last year.
Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 model provides improved multilingual support across text, images and video while enabling rapid AI agent deployment instead of slower generation pipelines.
ByteDance followed up with updates to its Doubao chatbot and the second version of its image-to-video tool, SeeDance, which has drawn copyright concerns from the Motion Picture Association due to the ease with which users can recreate protected material.
Zhipu AI expanded the landscape further with GLM-5, an open-source model built for long-context reasoning, coding tasks, and multi-step planning. The company highlighted the model’s reliance on Huawei hardware as part of China’s efforts to strengthen domestic semiconductor resilience.
Meanwhile, excitement continues to build for DeepSeek’s fourth-generation system, expected to follow the widespread adoption and market turbulence associated with its V3 model.
Authorities across parts of Europe have restricted the use of DeepSeek models in public institutions because of data security and cybersecurity concerns.
Even so, the rapid pace of development in China suggests intensifying competition in the design of agent-focused systems capable of managing complex digital tasks without constant human oversight.
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Ghana is set to host the Pan African AI and Innovation Summit 2026 in Accra, reinforcing its ambition to shape Africa’s digital future. The gathering will centre on ethical artificial intelligence, youth empowerment and cross-sector partnerships.
Advocates argue that AI systems must be built on local data to reflect African realities. Many global models rely on datasets developed outside the continent, limiting contextual relevance. Prioritising indigenous data, they say, will improve outcomes across agriculture, healthcare, education and finance.
National institutions are central to that effort. The National Information Technology Agency and the Data Protection Commission have strengthened digital infrastructure and privacy oversight.
Leaders now call for a shift from foundational regulation to active enablement. Expanded cloud capacity, high-performance computing and clearer ethical AI guidelines are seen as critical next steps.
Supporters believe coordinated governance and infrastructure investment can generate skilled jobs and position Ghana as a continental hub for responsible AI innovation.
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