Europe wants AI independence. The plan on the table subsidizes the rivals it names.

A stated goal can name the very dependence it entrenches. Industrial policy aimed at a foreign incumbent is most likely to land as a subsidy to that incumbent, because the fastest path to capacity runs through the firms that already have the balance sheet, the supply chain, and the customers.

EUobserver's reading of the Cloud and AI Development Act puts that pattern under a microscope. The Act creates "data centre acceleration zones" with expedited permits and grid connections, and overrides the environmental and public-participation safeguards that would otherwise apply. The text contains no clause barring the firms the policy names as the problem. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are not incidental tenants, EUobserver's reporting makes clear. They are the "anchor customers" whose long-term contracts underwrite the co-location projects, with BlackRock and KKR financing the same projects on the other side. The Commission's own market analysis, as EUobserver notes, already acknowledges this dependence.

Ursula von der Leyen called European AI "essential for our future independence," EUobserver records from the 2025 State of the Union. The mechanism on the table pays the US cloud giants to build more of themselves in Europe, on a faster timetable, with weaker legal channels for communities to resist. That is not independence. It is procurement, on a generation-long infrastructure timeline, with a named rapporteur in Parliament and a State of the Union address due to make the pitch harder to amend.