Francesca Bria

Another key lever—very “sexy”—is public procurement. Roughly 70% of public spending flows through procurement. We must reform procurement laws to include sovereignty criteria—interoperability, open source, new architectures. Otherwise, we keep spending public money on proprietary cloud and NVIDIA chips. Set targets—e.g., 50% of procurement by 2030 for interoperable, open, sovereign tech.

On funds: In EuroStack we propose a European Sovereignty Tech Fund—to enable these experiments. Start at €10B; scale to €100B or €300B if needed. Much of this is expensive.

On jobs: We’re not discussing this enough. New jobs will be created, but we must design for public value and fair distribution of the productivity gains—affordable housing (a human right Barcelona has fought for), healthcare, green cities, better jobs. Design funds with clear outcomes and governance.

Finally, beware the macro picture: of the $3T AI build‑out, 60–70% appears to be private credit. That’s where a bubble can form. The rest is big‑tech balance‑sheet funding. This mix is not sustainable.