The EuroStack Project

The EuroStack is Europe’s boldest proposal to reclaim digital sovereignty in the age of AI, surveillance capitalism, and techno-militarism. Developed by Francesca Bria and a wide coalition of European institutions and thinkers, the EuroStack presents a new political economy of digital infrastructure—reimagining the “stack” as a layered system of public power, ecological design, and democratic agency.
In contrast to the vertically integrated platforms of the United States and China—dominated by hyperscale compute, proprietary AI models, and extractive data regimes—the EuroStack envisions a federated, open, and plural technological foundation. Each layer of the stack—raw materials, chips, compute, AI, data, civic applications, and governance—is mapped not only as a site of geopolitical dependency, but as a field of collective reinvention.
The core question: What would it mean for Europe to build its own technological infrastructure for the common good?
The EuroStack is presented as a conceptual framework and policy blueprint. In the Ars Electronica 2025 context, the project is visualized through a curated info-architecture, mapping the stack’s seven layers and highlighting key sites of tension, opportunity, and transformation—from green semiconductors and sovereign cloud to democratic AI and planetary sensing.
Culturally and politically, the project draws inspiration from Europe’s history of cooperative institutions—from the postwar steel and coal union to today’s digital green transition—and asks how a shared technological infrastructure can become the backbone of a democratic, ecological and culturally sovereign Europe.
By situating digital infrastructure within the broader struggles of climate collapse, platform monopolies, and AI geopolitics, the EuroStack speaks to a Europe at a crossroads: either dependent on foreign systems or ready to build its own stack, layer by layer.