Technological sovereignty as a geopolitical category

Even superpowers depend on global supply chains. The real prize? Setting the rules others follow.

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A structural and widespread phenomenon

In contemporary strategic discourse, the term “technological sovereignty” has, over the course of a decade, followed a trajectory similar to that of other pivotal concepts in geopolitics: originating in a technical-sectoral context—the desire of certain powers to preserve strategically autonomous industrial capabilities, ranging from nuclear deterrence to computing supply chains — it has gradually expanded to encompass the entire spectrum of dual-use digital technologies, eventually becoming, in the 2025–2026 period, the declared cornerstone of industrial policy for a growing number of state actors, from the United States to China, from South Korea to India, from the Gulf states to major regional blocs . The scientific literature oscillates between two interpretive poles: on the one hand, the idea of sovereignty as an autonomous capacity for technological development; on the other, its interpretation as a network of reliable partnerships with external actors. No country, however powerful, adopts either model in its pure form: even the two technological superpowers, the United States and China , remain embedded in a semiconductor supply chain that distributes critical expertise among American design, Taiwanese manufacturing, Japanese materials, Asian packaging, and Dutch machinery—neither of them fully controls the value chain.

This conceptual ambiguity is not a flaw in theoretical elaboration, but rather a reflection of a structural condition common to every major contemporary political space. In Schmittian terms, each of these actors aspires to the status of Grossraum —an ordering space endowed with its own technological law—without, however, almost ever possessing either the fully integrated industrial base or the political cohesion necessary to impose that law beyond its own borders. The result, as we intend to argue here, is a sovereignty that is by definition relative and negotiated, whose degree of effectiveness depends less on the quantity of resources mobilized than on the ability to transform interdependence into a bargaining chip rather than endure it as a constraint—the “sovereignty through indispensability,” sovereignty by indispensability , distinct from pure productive self-sufficiency.

The degree of technological dependence varies in intensity but not in nature from one bloc to another. Even the actor that has invested the most public resources in self-sufficiency—China—remains far from its stated goals: the 2016 National Plan for Integrated Circuits aimed for 70% self-sufficiency in the microchip sector by 2025, a target missed by approximately 37 percentage points; the new plan presented in March 2026 sets a target of 80% by 2030, starting from an actual self-sufficiency rate of 41%. Beijing has also allocated approximately $295 billion over a five-year period to build a national network of data centers for artificial intelligence, requiring that at least 80% of the technology used—including accelerators—come from domestic suppliers such as Huawei. During the same period, India launched the India Semiconductor Mission, which has already approved thirteen projects—either operational or in development—including India’s first front-end manufacturing facility built by Tata Electronics in collaboration with the Dutch company ASML, as well as a $730 million National Quantum Mission aimed at making the country a quantum computing powerhouse by 2031.

On the artificial intelligence front , South Korea is now the most frequently cited textbook example of a path to “autonomy” distinct from both China’s self-sufficiency and passive dependence: $6.8 billion in public spending in 2026 alone, an agreement to acquire 260,000 of the latest-generation Nvidia GPUs, and over $540 billion in private investment by major national conglomerates (Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG) in data centers, chips, and AI applications—all without abandoning the use of U.S. technology but rather repositioning it on national platforms and models. The Gulf countries—led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—have chosen yet another path: not production, but preferential access to computing capacity. They have obtained authorization from the U.S. administration to purchase thousands of advanced GPUs and are transforming themselves into regional computing hubs, while Abu Dhabi is complementing this strategy by establishing new sovereign wealth funds dedicated to the technology and defense industries. In this comparative context, dependence on foreign suppliers for products, services, and critical digital infrastructure—which, in the case of one of the major Western economic blocs, amounts to over 80% of the total supply and an estimated annual expenditure of around 264 billion euros to third countries—appears less a regional anomaly than a recurring feature of the current historical phase, exacerbated everywhere by the acceleration of the global race toward artificial intelligence.

The case of semiconductors

The semiconductor sector offers the clearest point of comparison among the various strategies for technological sovereignty. Several national and supranational programs—in the United States, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and China—have in recent years set quantitative targets for market share or self-sufficiency, often falling significantly short of them: one of the most ambitious Western programs aimed to double, by 2030, a market share that an independent assessment deemed “highly unlikely” to be achieved, estimating an actual result at less than half of the stated target. Beijing , for its part, has opted for a different approach than Western tax incentives, focusing on direct equity investments and a state-led industrial policy through the 15th Five-Year Plan, with the goal of advancing to 7- and 5-nanometer process nodes and localizing machinery, materials, and electronic design tools. A recent incident has made it clear that even the seemingly most robust links in the supply chain remain vulnerable to cross-cutting geopolitical shocks: in 2025, U.S. pressure on the Dutch government to restrict exports by ASML — which holds the global monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography — triggered a freeze on the operations of a Chinese-owned semiconductor company, to which Beijing responded by blocking exports of components to the Western automotive industry, demonstrating how interdependence can quickly turn into a tool for mutual retaliation.

In this competitive landscape, mid-sized players are experimenting with hybrid approaches. India has strengthened its position in the supply chain through targeted technology partnerships—the Tata-ASML agreement for the Dholera plant is one example—rather than aiming for an entirely domestic value chain, while several Gulf countries have built their technological influence not on production capacity but on preferential access to computing infrastructure and bilateral partnerships, such as the emerging partnership between the United Arab Emirates and India on technology, energy, and defense. The common denominator in all these trajectories, according to the aforementioned Bruegel analysis, is not the pursuit of complete self-sufficiency—a goal deemed unrealistic in a global, highly specialized, and interdependent industry, even for the two technological superpowers—but rather control over key technological segments capable of making a given actor indispensable to the rest of the global supply chain.

Sovereignty through indispensability: the constraints of technological alliances

The most significant limitation of any technological sovereignty project, however, is not merely quantitative but geopolitical. In December 2025, the United States launched the “ Pax Silica ” initiative, aimed at coordinating strategic artificial intelligence supply chains—semiconductors, critical minerals, computing power, and energy—among allied countries, with the stated goal of reducing China’s access to critical technologies; in June 2026, several European and Asian countries formalized their membership. This paradox is a recurring feature in all technological alliance frameworks: those who join claim to want to reduce their critical dependencies, but they do so by entering an order built around and directed by the leadership of a single hegemonic actor, within a geopolitical perimeter defined by that actor. This asymmetry is made even more explicit by the MATCH Act, under debate in the U.S. Congress in 2026, which calls for aligning allies’ export controls with U.S. standards in the semiconductor equipment sector, with the threat of unilateral action should allies fail to independently close gaps in their own control regimes.

The most telling example of this structural vulnerability occurred in June 2026, when a U.S. government directive, motivated by cybersecurity concerns, mandated the deactivation of access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models for all users outside the United States, disrupting the operations of hospital networks, public administrations, and intelligence agencies in several countries that had integrated these systems into their critical processes. The incident brought to life the scenario that several preparatory documents for national strategies refer to as a “kill switch”: the risk that a foreign government could unilaterally cut off access to critical civilian or military infrastructure, regardless of the physical location of the servers or data centers. It is not surprising that, alongside their participation in U.S.-led multilateral initiatives, several countries are introducing differentiated levels of digital sovereignty for public procurement—effectively excluding non-domestic companies from the most sensitive sectors, such as defense and healthcare—in an attempt to balance access to the most advanced technologies with the protection of their own critical infrastructure nodes. It remains significant that the very same actors seeking to guard against such risks are, at the same time, joining U.S.-led initiatives for managing artificial intelligence supply chains: a form of sovereignty—to borrow an effective journalistic metaphor—that is “subscription-based” rather than fully owned.

internal Fragmentation: a problem common to all composite actors

External dependence is accompanied, in nearly all major technological blocs, by a persistent difficulty in internal coordination. This is not a problem exclusive to supranational architectures with twenty-seven or more members: even expanded cooperation formats such as the BRICS—which have increased their aggregate weight with the entry of new members in the energy and logistics sectors—suffer from the heterogeneity of their agendas — India and China do not share the same trade priorities, while Saudi Arabia and Iran maintain distinct national interests despite being part of the same forum — making technological and industrial coordination more complex precisely at a time when scale is becoming the decisive factor in global competition. In the absence of full joint leadership, national responses are multiplying: several countries have used public funds to roll out AI assistants developed in-house by their own government agencies; others have directed their security agencies toward data analytics software developed by domestic suppliers; still others have built cloud infrastructures declared “sovereign” for health and judicial data—strategies that are parallel rather than coordinated, replicated with minimal variations from one continent to another.

On the regulatory front, the same tension between the protection of digital rights and the pace of innovation recurs in institutional contexts that are very different from one another: where internal regulatory fragmentation—dozens of sector-specific laws and hundreds of regulatory authorities operating in distinct jurisdictions—produces a common side effect: the multiplication of compliance costs and the reduction of the market scale available to emerging technology companies, precisely at a time when the ability to operate in large, integrated markets constitutes the main competitive advantage of more mature technology ecosystems.

Technological sovereignty is a relative value, since every country—including the two technological superpowers—depends to some extent on others for its own development, and economic interdependence remains a structural factor destined to strengthen precisely as the available options for cooperation are reduced for political reasons [2] . What appears to have changed in recent years is not the nature of this dependence, but the extent to which it is exploited for geopolitical purposes: from U.S. controls on exports of advanced chips to the unilateral suspension of access to artificial intelligence models, from Chinese retaliatory measures against automotive components to new U.S.-led technological alliance architectures, interdependence is increasingly taking the form of a lever for mutual influence rather than a neutral market factor—a dynamic that affects both great powers and middle-tier actors to varying degrees.

No actor appears capable of achieving full technological sovereignty in the medium term: even the powers with the most substantial resources—China’s industrial capacity, U.S. financial and technological might—remain dependent on critical nodes in the global supply chain that they do not fully control, from Dutch EUV lithography to materials sourced from Asia. The real stakes, for any state actor involved in this competition, are therefore not the binary choice between complete autonomy and total dependence—an unrealistic option in the current international political economy—but rather the ability to transform one’s status as an indispensable partner into that of a co-normative authority : to influence the definition of global technological standards even where one does not hold industrial leadership. It is within this narrow but not insignificant space that the possibility lies for each pole—Western, Asian, Middle Eastern, or Eurasian—to remain an autonomous actor in an increasingly multipolar world order, rather than being reduced to a mere transit point for the technological rivalries of others.