EU’s Digital Decade targets must be updated to support tech and data sovereignty
CSC agrees with the need to review the Digital Decade targets and objectives considering the technological and geopolitical developments since the adoption of the Digital Decade policy programme in 2022. In this time and age, the programme must be tied even more closely to advancing Europe’s technological sovereignty as well as data sovereignty. European competitiveness goes hand in hand with technological sovereignty through reducing dependencies, strengthening Europe’s own capabilities and improving market access for European companies. In a world where digital services are dominated by few non-European players, it is crucial for Europe to support building its own capabilities.
Strong European RDI and skills development are elementary for addressing the challenge of supporting digital transformation throughout the society. Therefore, the need for multidisciplinary skills development must be better reflected in the Digital Decade policy programme. Considering the high energy consumption of the digital infrastructures supporting AI and other data-driven operations, sustainability considerations must also be brought into the scope of the programme.
CSC’s position paper on the upcoming review of the Digital Decade policy programme focuses on four key themes:
1.High-quality data for ethical AI and European innovation
To bring the Digital Decade policy programme up to speed with the AI revolution that has happened since its adoption, data as the raw material for value creation must be brought into its scope and spotlight.
Europe must counter-balance the current dominant closed, untransparent and possibly biased AI models. Europe must be bold in developing a European AI that is trustworthy, responsible, ethical and sustainable. This must be supported by the Digital Decade policy programme setting targets to ensure that data used for training AI models must be of high quality, open and transparent.
2. Data infrastructures for technological sovereignty
Currently Europe is dependent on non-European platforms when it comes to storing and accessing data. To tackle this, stronger ecosystem thinking and long-term planning is needed for developing infrastructures for high-performance computing (HPC), data, AI and quantum in a coherent way, for example within the context of EuroHPC. To support this, the Digital Decade policy programme must set targets for developing the necessary data infrastructures, including data centres, common European data spaces, AI Factory Data Labs and a European Web Data Infrastructure.
3. Multidisciplinary skills to fuel the digital transformation
Skills development has been a key part of the Digital Decade policy programme from the beginning and must remain so. The skills development targets of the Digital Decade must be developed further to reflect the systemic nature of digital transformation. Instead of only focusing on basic and specialist digital skills, a target must be set for measuring the understanding of the implications of digital transformation across sectors in order to ensure multidisciplinary understanding on how this transformation affects societies and what kind of skills are required in the future.
4. Sustainability for the Digital Decade and beyond
When the Digital Decade policy programme was first adopted, sustainability was mentioned as a topic to be revisited during the 2026 review of the programme. Considering the major environmental impact of AI’s electricity consumption, this idea has by no means lost its relevance. A new Digital Decade target to ensure sustainable operations of digital infrastructures should be developed based on the European sustainability rating scheme for data centres.
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Irina Kupiainen
Irina Kupiainen is responsible for CSC’s Public Affairs.