Brussels' 27 May package, two days before G7

Chips Act II will let the European Commission take direct equity stakes in semiconductor factories, removing the member-state middlemen who proved unable to secure private investment at Magdeburg and Crolles. Bloomberg reported the provision on 30 April 2026, alongside confirmation that €37.5bn in cancelled commitments had been stripped from the original Chips Act.

Direct equity authority changes the EU's role from subsidy administrator to co-investor, which alters the risk-sharing calculus for chipmakers considering European facilities. Read full version ↓

A leaked CAIDA draft, reported by CNBC on 7 May and confirmed by gHacks on 12 May, bars US cloud providers from holding EU public-sector financial, judicial, and health data. The private enterprise market, which accounts for about 70 per cent of EU cloud revenue, is left untouched.

The public-sector carve-out means Microsoft, Amazon, and Google lose access to a symbolically important but financially limited slice of the EU market; while keeping the bulk of their European revenue unaffected. Read full version ↓

The Council of the EU and the European Parliament agreed an AI Omnibus deal on 7 May 2026, pushing the compliance deadline for high-risk AI systems from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027. General-purpose AI providers such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic keep the original August 2026 deadline.

The deal splits enforcement into two speeds: US-based foundation model providers face earlier scrutiny, while European companies building on top of those models get 16 months more time to prepare. Read full version ↓

France awarded its national health data platform contract to Scaleway on 23 April 2026, in a multi-year deal worth around €180m. Millions of French citizens' health records will move off Microsoft Azure. Migration is targeted for late 2026 to early 2027, but Scaleway must first complete SecNumCloud certification from France's national cyber-security agency ANSSI.

The contract is the most significant European sovereign-cloud win since the EU awarded its institutional framework last week; and it removes Microsoft's most politically visible French public-sector reference customer. Read full version ↓

Mistral AI launched Le Chat Enterprise and its Mistral Medium 3.5 model on 29 April 2026. The model runs 128 billion parameters with a 256,000-token context window, can be deployed on a company's own servers, and comes with GDPR data-residency guarantees. It competes directly with ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude Enterprise for EU public-sector and regulated-industry contracts.

The launch is Mistral's first product test of the €830m debt it raised in March, and it arrives six days before Arthur Mensch co-signed the seven-CEO deregulation letter to the Commission. Read full version ↓

France is hosting the G7 Digital Ministerial at the finance ministry in Bercy, Paris, on 29 May 2026. Anne Le Hénanff, France's Minister Delegate for AI and Digital Affairs, chairs the session, with AI security, AI diffusion, protection of minors online, and digital resilience as the stated priorities.

The ministerial lands two days after the planned Tech Sovereignty Package adoption, which means the communique will reflect whether G7 partners accept or contest Brussels' new two-speed AI enforcement calendar. Read full version ↓

ASML's Q2 2026 revenue guidance midpoint came in at €8.7bn, about €300m below analyst consensus of €9.0bn. That miss stacks on top of a 17-percentage-point fall in Chinese revenue share, from 36 per cent to 19 per cent, recorded in the previous quarter.

For European semiconductor strategy, the numbers matter beyond ASML's own results: the company cross-subsidises the R&D costs of its leading-edge EUV machines through mature-node sales to China, and that subsidy is being compressed by US export restrictions. Read full version ↓

The European Commission published draft guidance on the Cyber Resilience Act's (CRA) open-source provisions on 3 March 2026. The guidance draws the liability line at the publisher who controls a project, not individual contributors with commit access. It also flags that financial donations to an open-source project can trigger 'placed on market' compliance obligations.

The reporting deadline under the CRA starts 11 September 2026, whether or not final guidance is published before then. Read full version ↓

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency launched a programme on 19 May 2026 paying open-source software maintainers €4,800 to €5,200 per month to participate in the IETF, W3C, and ISO standards bodies. Up to ten places were available for the year from June 2026 to June 2027.

This is the only programme in Europe that directly funds participation in internet and web standards bodies, filling a gap that the Commission's proposed €350m Sovereign Tech Fund has not yet closed. Read full version ↓

The Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger resolved at a 90/10 equity split, with Germany's Schwarz Group anchoring €500m in structured financing. The deal is targeting a close in the second half of 2026, with dual headquarters planned in Canada and Germany. As of 17 May 2026, no formal filing had been submitted to Germany's Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office).

The missing filing is the outstanding gate: without it, Berlin's sovereignty conditions cannot be translated into legally enforceable merger commitments, and the deal remains announced intent rather than a tested legal structure. Read full version ↓