The Brussels think tank Bruegel published Analysis 13/2026 on Tuesday 19 May, finding Europe structurally dependent on US or Chinese computing infrastructure regardless of what CAIDA does1. Bruegel is an economic policy institute whose work feeds directly into EU debate. Its finding is a layer argument: CAIDA can mandate where European public data is hosted, but it says nothing about where the silicon underneath that data comes from, and Europe has no leading-edge AI accelerator of its own to switch to.
The numbers frame the gap. Chinese domestic chips now power 41 per cent of China's data centres, and Huawei projects AI-chip revenue of $12bn in 2026, up from $7.5bn the year before2. Both Washington and Beijing are manufacturing their way out of dependence; Europe is legislating around it. The dependency Bruegel measures is a cumulative-investment failure with no fab to point to: the cancelled Magdeburg and Crolles projects left the bloc with no leading-edge plant, and ASML's softening guidance is the only European hardware story with scale, and it sells the machines that make chips elsewhere, not the chips.
Bruegel's recommendation borrows the tool Chips Act II already adopts: coordinated EU procurement for compute on the Airbus model, plus subsidies to compensate firms that move off Nvidia. The Draghi report's delivery-gap diagnosis is the backdrop; the correct prescription has been on record for a year. A law that governs the cloud layer leaves the hardware layer exactly where it was, which is the case Bruegel puts to a Commission about to adopt that law.
