Europe

Financial Times, 2 January 2026

Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned.

Miguel De Bruycker, director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB), told the Financial Times that it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure.

“We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”

The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.

This dependence was not an “enormous security problem” for the EU, said De Bruycker, who has led the CCB since it was founded a decade ago. But Europe was missing out on crucial new technologies, which are being spearheaded in the US and elsewhere, he said. These include cloud computing and artificial intelligence — both vital for defending European countries against cyber attacks.

Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.

He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.

It could be similar to when European countries jointly set up the planemaker Airbus, he said: “Everybody was supporting the Airbus initiatives decades ago. We need the same initiative on [an] EU level in the cyber domain.”

Companies such as OVHcloud in France and Germany’s Schwarz Digital already provide crucial digital infrastructure, according to IT experts.

EU countries have been fretting about their dependency on US tech companies such as Amazon, with calls growing to increase Europe’s “technological sovereignty”.

De Bruycker said those discussions were often “religious” and lacked focus, however. “I think on an EU level we should clearly identify what sovereignty means to us in the digital domain,” he said. “Instead of putting that focus on how can we stop the US ‘hyperscalers’, maybe we put our energy in . . . building up something by ourselves.”

Belgium, as a host of the EU institutions and Nato, has been in the crosshairs of increased hybrid attacks allegedly staged by Russia, with increased cyber assaults and drone incursions into its airspace since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Last year Belgium suffered five waves of DDoS attacks lasting days, in which compromised devices overwhelm websites of businesses and government agencies to temporarily take them down. De Bruycker said the attacks typically targeted up to 20 different organisations per day, with “Russian hacktivists” generally behind them.

Although it was unclear whether the Kremlin was directly sponsoring them, the attacks generally followed as a response to anti-Russian statements by politicians.

“Sometimes . . . it’s not even a Belgian official, it’s an EU official who has said something in Brussels, and they start to attack,” he said.

Although such attacks have increased, De Bruycker does not see them as particularly harmful and says they are mostly aimed at disruption. “It’s temporary, it’s not stealing any information. It’s really disturbing the normal functioning of the website or the portal.”

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US hyperscalers were crucial in helping salvage data from Russian attacks, he said.

He also expressed confidence in continued co-operation with American companies to crack down on bad actors, despite US tech companies having aligned themselves closely with the Trump administration, which has repeatedly signalled it would step away from supporting Europe’s security.