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One doesn’t often hear senior officials from the European Union, with its centralized governance of 27 member countries, talk about sovereignty. But that was very much at the heart of the agenda during Roberto Viola’s visit to Washington last week.

Viola, the European Commission’s longtime chief tech regulator, met with U.S. officials to try to manage a persistently tense relationship between Europe and the United States under U.S. President Donald Trump. As part of this effort, Viola signed the EU on to the Trump administration’s Pax Silica initiative, which is aimed at securing technological supply chains.

One doesn’t often hear senior officials from the European Union, with its centralized governance of 27 member countries, talk about sovereignty. But that was very much at the heart of the agenda during Roberto Viola’s visit to Washington last week.

Viola, the European Commission’s longtime chief tech regulator, met with U.S. officials to try to manage a persistently tense relationship between Europe and the United States under U.S. President Donald Trump. As part of this effort, Viola signed the EU on to the Trump administration’s Pax Silica initiative, which is aimed at securing technological supply chains.

But he also sought to lay out the European Union’s new “tech sovereignty” agenda. That push is anchored in a package, released on June 3, that calls for the bloc to strengthen its “competitiveness, strategic autonomy and geoeconomic position” in artificial intelligence by developing more of its own capacity in semiconductor manufacturing, cloud computing, and AI model development, with a view to “protecting Europe’s digital independence.”

Viola insists that Europe’s sovereignty push is not an effort to wean itself off dependence on U.S. technology. “I think it’s well understood that tech sovereignty doesn’t mean tech isolation,” he told an audience at the Atlantic Council. “Tech sovereignty means … being proactive when it comes to innovation and being sure that you understand who are your friends and allies and where the danger lies.”

But behind closed doors, European officials have been grappling with an increasing uncertainty about which side of that equation the United States currently sits on. U.S. tech firms such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta have........

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