Here’s a short(er) version of this op/ed into, made to fit; the longer version is available here, and in the links below.

Christophe Fouquet’s warning about chip interventions reads like another Brussels takedown. But it is about something more structural – that Europe is trying to govern the new AI era with sledgehammer policy tools designed for a different age. Its so-called ‘Chips Act 2.0’ seeks to control critical chip supplies in times of shortage. The instinct is good. Semiconductors are the building blocks of modern tech. But Fouquet’s argument, as reported in the FT, is not just that Europe lacks leverage in this base layer, but that it lacks it everywhere. Without a sovereign stake in every layer, which no country has, any attempts to steer chip flows are impotent.

But Europe’s broader play is subtler. Approaches by state governments, as discussed here recently, are more representative of how big telcos, say, are geared around sovereign AI – and of how ASML and the rest see it. They are quite pragmatic, seeking to apply jurisdictional controls around residency, trust, and access, and to make good on their national assets – lately, nuclear power (France) and supercomputers (UK) – and set their big industrial guns as corporate AI landlords. The UK comparison is informative: its strategy is to also strengthen its capability in parts of the AI supply chain where it has niche strengths, such as chip design, GPU networking, R&D clusters, startups.

Which might generate real companies and influence over time. But the UK is not mandating structural control of chip supplies; just how to apply lighter-touch mechanisms to effect sovereign AI, and develop its stake in the AI world.

All of which is being discussed as SpaceX floats on the stock exchange with an extra-terrestrial full-stack infrastructure play, heaps of debt, and untold shareholder riches. On the face of it, SpaceX starts to look like an AWS of the skies – like it is going to hyper-scale the hyperscale model for the AI age. But that is not true. Yes, its space setup gets around familiar planning and connectivity bottlenecks, traded for new bottlenecks of its own. But it is not a cloud compute layer in orbit. It is a parallel network, which integrates rockets and satellites, and fills a hole in rural coverage on the ground, and might some day serve niche segmented compute workloads.

Sovereignty does not escape the system, however. Space-based networks still depend on ground stations, spectrum authorisations, regulatory frameworks, gateways and devices, and Earthbound supply chains. They extend reach and resilience; they don’t eliminate jurisdictional controls. So sovereignty, itself, is just being distributed too – across terrestrial, subsea, airborne, and orbital systems. Fouquet’s warning is that the EU is still looking to impose control on a system that is increasingly horizontal and layered – when sovereignty is not about controlling stacks or supply chains. It is about identifying where control is still meaningful, and building leverage at those points.

James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News

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