Europe has tech stars. They’re far behind the US.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It wasn’t long ago—say, two months— that European governments and companies thought nothing of relying on Microsoft software for daily tasks or Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services for data storage. Not so much anymore.

President Donald Trump, who has proclaimed that the European Union was “formed in order to screw the United States," is girding for trade warfare over the continent’s moves to tax and regulate U.S. tech giants. A Feb.

21 White House memorandum directs relevant cabinet departments to “defend American companies and innovators from overseas extortion," with Europe’s digital services taxes as Exhibit A. “There are serious concerns about America weaponizing digital infrastructure," says Dimitar Lilkov, senior research officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. Enter the EuroStack.

This concept was fleshed out in a “bold vision for digital sovereignty" recently issued by the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, with a roster of co-signers from academia and nongovernmental organizations. Digital independence for Old Europe looks like an uphill climb. The U.S.

accounts for 71% of global research-and-development spending on “software and internet technologies," and 70% of “foundational AI models," according to the report itself. China is runner-up in both categories. European catch-up would cost 300 billion euros ($323 billion), the report estimates, while the continent is already scrambling to find huge sums for a defense upgrade.

Balkanized European financial markets are no match for Nasdaq and U.S. venture capitalists in nurturing the next emerging genius. “The EuroStack cannot work without a major initiative to deepen capital markets," says Andrea