France and Germany used the VivaTech conference in Paris on 17 June to publish a shared definition of what "digital sovereignty" means, the thing the debate had so far lacked. The two governments set out six dimensions, from legal enforceability and data protection to a preference for EU providers, open source and sovereign computing, and relaunched their Franco-German Future Works platform to catalogue sovereign alternatives and map where Europe is most exposed.
Paris put money behind the words. France mobilised €13bn under the third phase of Tibi, the state-backed scheme that steers institutional capital into French and European deep tech, with half earmarked for quantum, space, biotech and AI and a target of €15bn by 2030. The new contributors read like a roll-call of strategic France: rail operators SNCF and RATP, missile-maker MBDA, warship-builder Naval Group and satellite operator Eutelsat.
Brussels has spent a year funding sovereignty instruments without an agreed test for what counts as sovereign, and a programme cannot audit what it never defined. The open-source dimension echoes the EU's own €2bn open-source procurement strategy adopted the same month. France's digital minister pointed to SAP's partnership with Mistral as the working proof: a German enterprise-software giant running a French sovereign model inside public administration.
