22-07-2026

Eunews, a leading European information portal, has published the first installment of the column “Together: the New Way of AI”, a series of articles by Valeria Sandei, Chief Global AI of Almaviva and CEO of Almawave, which explore key issues related to AI and digital transformation.

The first article focuses on “Digital Sovereignty: Europe's Challenge and Imperative”. “We need to establish clear ground rules because, used as is, the term digital sovereignty risks becoming nothing more than an empty slogan. The important point is that sovereignty does not belong to whoever hosts the data, but to whoever truly controls it.

For many, sovereignty simply means that the servers are located in Italy and that the data remains in Europe. While this is reassuring, it is not enough. It’s not geography that matters - it’s the value chain. Sovereignty is a chain: we are only as sovereign as its weakest link.

Europe is moving in this direction, with the European Technological Sovereignty Package - a legislative initiative covering semiconductors, cloud computing, open source, and AI - which introduces new regulatory obligations, sovereignty standards, and an investment plan extending through 2036. A roadmap designed to ensure the best competitive positioning of European-owned companies in global markets and to advance Europe’s technological independence in AI.

What needs to be done to regain sovereignty? We need to leverage Italy’s technological capabilities.

There are three corollaries to the above. First, we must harness demand by ensuring that public procurement and industrial purchasing reward European added value. Second, we should use open source as a multiplier, allowing an open and European model to become a platform on which companies can then build their own solutions. Third, we must bring AI into SMEs (not only in Italy, but also across much of Europe). The objective is clear: to implement technology from the ground up, in a bottom-up approach, rather than imposing it from the top down. A technology that is sustainable, sovereign, and deployable wherever it is needed.”

“The question is not how large the model is, but how well it understands my problem,” Sandei continues. “The model can travel and circulate, but the data remains. That is true sovereignty.”