La technological sovereignty It has entered the vocabulary of European industrial policies but has often left its contours undefined. The objective cannot be to reconstruct the entire value chain within national borders.artificial intelligence, from semiconductors to foundational models to cloud infrastructure. No European economy, not even the largest, has the financial and industrial scale necessary to compete independently with United States e China on every segment of the supply chain. Chasing atechnological autarchy It would mean wasting limited resources on unattainable objectives, taking them away from truly decisive interventions.
Sovereignty must be understood in a more precise and more operational sense: as ability to choose. It means being able to decide Which addictions to accept and which to avoid, being able to verify where one's data resides and who accesses it, being able to replace a supplier when contractual, geopolitical, or technological conditions require it. This is a condition that is built by maintaining critical skills, concrete alternatives, and negotiating power. In this sense, technological sovereignty is compatible, indeed complementary, with a intensive use of infrastructure and models developed elsewhere.
For Italy this distinction has a particular importance, because the terrain on which the game is played is not generically digital, but paintingItaly's competitive advantage does not lie in a single technological sector, but in the strength of its manufacturing system and in the wealth of skills, processes, and know-how accumulated over decades. This is where artificial intelligence can create or destroy value. Production data, procedures, parameters, and application knowledge aren't just information: they represent competitive advantage in digital form. Using AI without controlling where this data is processed, stored, or transferred means risk compromising industrial autonomy in exchange for an immediate productivity advantage.
This is where security and growth merge into a single strategic requirement. A well-calibrated policy of technological sovereignty serves to protect what makes Italy competitive in the world: the possibility of grafting artificial intelligence onto its industrial fabric without giving up control of the information and infrastructure that supports it. The following pages (for more information, read here, ed) address this tension along multiple dimensions, with the aim of showing how Italy's manufacturing strength can be transferred, and not dispersed, in the new economy of artificial intelligence.
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The published text is the fourth in a series of analyses dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and technological sovereignty by Franco Bernabe, President of TechVisory, which FIRSTonline hosts weekly courtesy of the author and the AI Magazine.
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