alt Hacker NewsI honestly wonder whether the EU can afford to spend on technological sovereignty. With an aging population and the need to maintain welfare states, governments will have to allocate more and more of future budgets to expanding and sustaining welfare programs (statutory health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc.). That ultimately means higher taxes, a larger government workforce, and a shrinking private sector. Maybe they will have enough money to maintain the existing status quo, but not sure where the additional capital would come from to invest in digital sovereignty.
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The EU has the capacity, but will be working closely with other partners like India, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Vietnam, and the UAE as capital and/or technology partners.
For example, Eutelsat - which is providing the backbone for GOVSATCOM and IRIS2 - is a three-way partnership between India's Bharti Group (Sunil Mittal), the French, and the UK. Or GCAP where Japan's Mitsubishi Group is acting as both a technology and capital partner to Italy and the UK.
This was also a major driver behind the EU-India Defense Pact and the EU-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership - both of which were overshadowed by the EU-India FTA.
A multilateral organization like the EU has the muscle to integrate and cooperate with other partners, which is something that shouldn't be underestimated, as this builds resilience via redundancy.
Edit: Interesting how this is the second time [0] in the past few weeks where an HN comment I wrote that was optimistic about the EU's capacity was downvoted. There's a reason the PRC is still conducting industrial espionage on EU institutions [1].
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696996
[1] - https://www.intelligenceonline.fr/asie-pacifique/2026/01/14/...
Most of the "digital sovereignty" stuff is spending money on companies that intend to sell services at a profit and pay taxes on it. So they absolutely can afford to do it (and governments have more routes to getting money back than just exits) provided you back the right companies. That's probably more easily achieved in digital sovereignty than space launch though.