Europe’s Sovereignty Story Had a Missing Chapter, It Was Called Silicon.

Europe’s Sovereignty Story Had a Missing Chapter, It Was Called Silicon. Europe has made real progress on digital sovereignty in the past three years. Open-source software is gaining ground. Data residency rules are tightening. Cloud alternatives are emerging. But there is a gap in this story that almost nobody talks about: the chip itself. Every sovereign cloud, every sovereign AI model, every sovereign government system in Europe runs on silicon designed and manufactured outside Europe. That is not sovereignty. That is sovereignty with an asterisk. Key takeaways: - Europe’s digital sovereignty efforts remain dependent on foreign chip architectures. - RISC-V provides an open instruction set architecture that removes licensing dependencies. - Openchip is building European RISC-V solutions for AI and HPC workloads. - SUSE is enabling enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, and AI workloads on Openchip silicon. - Sovereign silicon may become a foundational component of future European digital sovereignty strategies. The dependency runs deeper than most realize Here are some numbers worth sitting with. Taiwan produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, primarily through TSMC. Three US-headquartered companies provide roughly 70% of Europe’s cloud infrastructure. The architecture that power nearly all processors (x86 and ARM) are controlled by American and British corporations. Europe’s own share of global chip production sits at roughly 10%. The EU’s ambition is to double that to 20% by 2030 through the EU Chips Act and over €43 billion in public and private investment. That is encouraging. But even the most optimistic scenario leaves Europe deeply dependent on foreign silicon for the compute that powers its critical systems. We saw what happened during the pandemic chip shortage. Car factories stopped. Healthcare device production slowed. The disruption was not theoretical. It was real, and it was painful. And the geopolitical tensions around Taiwan and US export controls have only increased since then. If you run a public-sector IT environment, or a hospital network, or a defense system, you are likely running on chips where the architecture is licensed from abroad and the fabrication happens in Asia. That is a supply chain risk that no amount of software sovereignty can fully address. Why RISC-V changes the equation This is where RISC-V enters the conversation. RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture. For this both open-source and proprietary implementations of the architecture exist. There is not single company controlling it. Full transparency into how the chip works at the architecture level. The concept is the same one that made Linux the foundation of enterprise IT. When the architecture is open, innovation is not limited by someone else’s business model or geopolitical position. You can design, modify, and manufacture chips based on RISC-V without needing permission from anyone. No license can be revoked. No export restriction can cut off access to the architecture itself. It is happening already today. More than 10 billion chips containing RISC-V cores have already shipped globally. NVIDIA alone has shipped over a billion. As of early 2026, RISC-V has reached approximately 25% market penetration worldwide. Major technology companies including Qualcomm, Google, and Meta are investing heavily. The enterprise-grade RVA23 profile, ratified in 2025, is crucial as it includes the RVV vector instructions, essential for HPC and AI and hypervisor support necessary for environments like SUSE BuildService and cloud deployments. For Europe, the opportunity is clear: design chips on an open architecture, develop them on European soil, and run them with European open-source software. That is sovereignty without the asterisk. Europe is already moving This is not just a policy ambition. Real companies and real investment are behind this. Openchip, a European systems scale-up headquartered in Barcelona, is one of the most important names in this space. The company develops RISC-V-based System-on-Chip solutions for AI and high-performance computing. It has been selected by the European Commission as an Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) and received €111 million from the EU’s Next Generation Funds. Openchip is also a core partner in the DARE project (Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe), a €240 million initiative backed by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and 38 European partners. The goal is concrete: build the hardware and software ecosystem for critical HPC and AI applications using European-designed RISC-V chips. And this is where SUSE enters the picture. SUSE and Openchip are setting up a collaboration to bring SUSE’s full product stack to Openchip’s silicon. The collaboration covers three tracks: enabling Openchip hardware through SLES, Rancher, and openSUSE Tumbleweed; developing Rancher as the Kubernetes and fleet management layer for sovereign deployments; and integrating SUSE AI components with Openchip’s AI inference service offering. SUSE has been enabling new chip architectures for over 25 years. First commercial SUSE partnerships started around 1999, and one of SUSE’s most significant achievements in this area was porting Linux to the then-new and experimental x86-64 architecture—now the ubiquitous standard for AMD and Intel CPUs. Enabling European open silicon is a natural next step. It is what SUSE does: make new hardware production-ready with enterprise-grade open-source software. Who benefits first Four verticals who stand to benefit greatly from a European chip-to-software stack: Public sector and government: Regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act and DORA require auditable, controllable technology. A sovereign silicon-to-application stack gives governments full control over the systems that serve their citizens. Healthcare: Patient data sits under some of the strictest regulations in Europe. Running AI diagnostics on fully sovereign infrastructure is not just a preference. It is a compliance requirement that is growing every year. Defense and national security: Supply chain assurance is non-negotiable. Open-architecture chips where every layer can be audited provide something proprietary silicon cannot: certainty that no foreign government can disrupt the foundation. Critical infrastructure: Energy, transport, telecommunications, water. NIS2 mandates higher cybersecurity standards for operators in these sectors. A sovereign chip-to-software stack reduces dependency on foreign supply chains for the systems that keep society running. The next chapter starts now Europe’s sovereignty conversation has been focused on the right topics: data, cloud, software, regulation. All of that matters. But the foundation of every digital system is the chip it runs on. As long as that chip is designed abroad, licensed from a foreign company, and manufactured in a single geography, sovereignty remains incomplete. The SUSE and Openchip collaboration is one signal that this is changing. Open-source silicon combined with open-source software, both designed and supported in Europe, is the most complete sovereign technology proposition emerging on the continent right now. What does your organization’s sovereignty strategy look like below the operating system? Have you thought about the chip layer? I would be curious to hear how this conversation is going in your organization. More details on the SUSE and Openchip partnership will follow soon. Stay connected. Frequently Asked Questions What is digital sovereignty? Digital sovereignty is an organization’s or nation’s ability to control its data, infrastructure, software, and technology decisions without undue dependence on external providers. What is RISC-V? RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) that allows organizations to design processors without proprietary licensing requirements. Why is RISC-V important for Europe? RISC-V enables European organizations to develop processor architectures independently, reducing dependency on foreign technology vendors. What is sovereign silicon? Sovereign silicon refers to chip architectures and semiconductor technologies that can be developed, audited, and controlled locally. Related Articles Mar 24th, 2026 The Power of Community for Enterprise AI Jul 29th, 2025