Forrester’s new forecast has a blunt verdict for the billions governments are spending on tech independence. The average sovereignty score across 14 major economies will rise just one point by 2030, from 39% to 40%. China stays on top, with a score above 82% through the decade, and the US trails at 79%.
The other twelve countries Forrester tracked, from Germany to Mexico, stay stuck well below both leaders. And much of their new spending is landing with the same foreign clouds, chipmakers and software vendors the strategy is supposed to replace.
Nine Metrics, One Percentage Point
Forrester, the Massachusetts based research and advisory firm, published the index for the first time this month inside a report titled Global Sovereignty Forecast, 2025 To 2030. It defines tech sovereignty as a country’s ability to build, run and secure its critical technology without a foreign government able to pull the plug on it.
The index scores each of 14 economies across nine areas:
- Government AI investment
- Cloud sovereignty
- Technology workforce availability
- AI model development
- Data centre capacity relative to technology spending
- Data centre autonomy
- Semiconductor production
- Software creation
- Rare earths processing
That is the full scorecard behind the number governments keep chasing. Move the needle on one or two of those nine areas, and the overall score barely twitches.
China and the US Leave Twelve Rivals Behind
The gap between the leaders and everyone else is the real headline inside Forrester’s numbers. China is projected to remain the strongest performer, holding a score above 82% all the way through 2030. The US follows at 79%. No other country gets close.
| Country | 2025 Score | 2030 Score |
|---|---|---|
| China | Above 82% | Above 82% |
| United States | ~79% | 79% |
| South Korea | 45% | 47% |
| Japan | 43% | 46% |
| Germany | 34% | 36% |
| Spain | 34% | 36% |
| Canada | 33% | 34% |
| France | 33% | 35% |
| India | 32% | 35% |
| Australia | 29% | 29% |
| UK | 30% | 32% |
| Italy | 27% | 29% |
| Mexico | 20% | 20% |
Brazil is the fourteenth country in Forrester’s cohort, folded into the 14-country average, though the firm did not publish a separate score for it alongside these figures. South Korea, the best of the rest, only climbs from 45% to 47%. Mexico sits flat at the bottom, at 20%, the lowest of the 14.
“Today, tech sovereignty is concentrated in the hands of a few global leaders, creating an uneven competitive advantage for some countries,” said Dario Maisto, a principal analyst at Forrester who advises technology executives on digital sovereignty strategy and led the report.
Why Is Chip Production the Forecast’s Outlier?
Semiconductor manufacturing is the one category where sovereignty scores jump fast. The US and South Korea are both projected to leap from 45% in 2025 to 79% in 2030, as governments and chipmakers pour money into fabs on friendly soil to cut exposure to supply shocks and export controls.
Japan rises from 36% to 53%. China moves from 40% to 51%. India climbs from zero to 13%, the steepest relative jump of the group, even though it starts from having no domestic chip production sovereignty at all.
| Country | 2025 Chip Score | 2030 Chip Score |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 45% | 79% |
| South Korea | 45% | 79% |
| Japan | 36% | 53% |
| China | 40% | 51% |
| India | 0% | 13% |
Building chips locally does not make a country self sufficient elsewhere, though. A country can expand local chip output while still leaning on overseas cloud platforms, foreign software or AI models trained somewhere else entirely. That is why the average score across all 14 countries barely moves even as chip investment surges: sovereignty runs through a chain of sectors, and chips are only one link.
The same concentration shows up one layer up the stack, in AI hardware, where OpenAI’s decision to tap Google’s own chip silicon underlined how few companies actually design the processors behind frontier AI models.
Sovereignty Becomes the Industry’s Favorite Sales Pitch
Vendors noticed the sovereignty panic before most governments finished writing their strategies. “There is a lot of hype around sovereignty, because service providers see it as the money maker,” Maisto told ITPro, a British technology publication. “So why should an organization engage with me? Well, sovereignty.”
The market backs him up:
- $80 billion – worldwide spending on sovereign cloud services expected in 2026, up 35.6% from a year earlier, according to Gartner, the technology research and advisory firm.
- 83% – year-over-year growth in European sovereign cloud spending for 2026, though it starts from a small $6.9 billion base in 2025, per Gartner.
- 20% – the share of that new spending that actually shifts existing workloads away from global providers; the remaining 80% is net-new spending layered on top, Gartner found.
- €120 billion – the combined public and private investment the European Commission says is needed by 2035 to make the bloc’s own cloud and AI capacity competitive.
Every one of those figures describes money moving. None of them describe independence arriving on schedule.
Europe’s Sovereign Clouds Still Run on Foreign Servers
Nowhere is the mismatch sharper than in Europe’s own cloud contracts. Amazon Web Services switched on its European Sovereign Cloud on January 15, 2026, from a data centre complex in Brandenburg, Germany, backed by a €7.8 billion investment. The region runs on separate infrastructure staffed by EU residents. AWS is still an American company, bound by American law.
Microsoft built a parallel offering, promising that customer data stays in Europe under European law through a feature it calls Data Guardian. One analysis published by CIO, a US trade title, called the whole approach “a smokescreen.”
The European Commission tested its own rules for the first time this year. It tendered a €180 million ($209.09 million) cloud contract in October 2025 and awarded it in April 2026, the first procurement in EU history to apply explicit sovereignty criteria. The winners were Post Telecom, paired with CleverCloud and OVHcloud, along with StackIT, Scaleway and Proximus, all European groups.
That contract was the exception. US hyperscalers, mainly AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, still control more than 70% of the EU cloud market, according to European Commission figures, while European providers hold roughly 15%. That European share has slid for years, from about 29% in 2017 to around 15% by 2022, per the Commission’s own accounting.
Ireland’s parliament illustrated the pull of incumbency this year, when the Oireachtas picked Microsoft to run a core government system despite the EU’s sovereignty demands. Even inside the bloc pushing hardest for tech independence, the default choice keeps landing on the same handful of American vendors.
Brussels Answers With Law, Not Just Money
Brussels concluded that money alone would not close the gap, so it reached for legislation instead. The European Commission unveiled its technological sovereignty package covering chips, AI, cloud and open source on June 3, 2026.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc could not keep depending on outsiders “for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure.”
The centrepiece is the Cloud and AI Development Act. It sets up four assurance levels that grade how independent a cloud provider must be to win sensitive public contracts, running from basic transparency requirements at the bottom to full EU ownership, control and staff nationality rules at the top. A companion measure, Chips Act 2.0, targets semiconductor capacity separately.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice president for technological sovereignty, put it more bluntly. She told reporters the goal was simple: “We want to make sure that nobody has a so-called kill switch possibility there.”
Britain is watching the same dynamic from outside the bloc. A parliamentary committee urged ministers to draft a UK tech sovereignty plan after Anthropic tightened its model access controls, a reminder that leaning on any single foreign AI lab carries its own risk. Forrester’s own number for the UK barely moves either, climbing from 30% to 32% by 2030.
Dependence Management Becomes the New Sovereignty Goal
Forrester’s own writeup of the findings settled on a conclusion blunter than the press release.
The real challenge is not achieving independence. It’s managing dependence.
That line comes from Forrester’s own review of the forecast’s findings, published alongside the report. Governments invested billions in sovereign cloud programs, national AI plans and chip manufacturing on the assumption that sovereignty equals self-sufficiency, an assumption Forrester calls “detached from reality.” Even China and the US, the firm noted, still “continue to rely on external resources, markets, and supply chains,” despite topping the index.
Maisto put the same point in more concrete terms in his interview with ITPro. “I think seven out of 10 international SaaS solutions are out of the US,” he said. “So how feasible is it that organizations replace 20 years of investment in Salesforce, in Workday, in ServiceNow overnight?”
Europe’s own numbers make his point. The region accounts for less than 10% of global chip manufacturing capacity, and its companies design just 1% of the world’s chips, according to Forrester’s research. Maisto’s advice to clients now is to manage the dependencies rather than avoid them. Total independence, in his telling, is off the table for everyone, not just the smaller economies.
Forrester’s forecast runs through 2030. By then, on its own numbers, the average country will have moved its sovereignty score by one point, and China and the US will still be the only two economies clearing 79%.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which 14 Countries Does Forrester’s Tech Sovereignty Index Cover?
Forrester scored Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the UK and the US for its Global Sovereignty Forecast, 2025 To 2030. Brazil sits inside the 14-country average Forrester published, though the firm did not break out a separate public score for it in the figures released alongside the report.
Where Is Sovereign Cloud Spending Growing the Fastest?
Gartner projects the fastest growth in the Middle East and Africa, at 89% year over year in 2026, followed by Asia Pacific at 87%. Growth is far slower in the US, around 29%, and slowest in China, at about 26%, largely because both already run mostly on domestic infrastructure.
What Is the Cloud and AI Development Act?
It is the European Commission’s proposed law, unveiled June 3, 2026, that grades cloud and AI providers across four sovereignty assurance levels before they can bid on sensitive public sector contracts. The proposal still needs approval from the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before it takes effect.
Is Data Residency the Same as Data Sovereignty?
No. Data residency just means data sits inside a specific country’s borders. Forrester’s Maisto has said hyperscale clouds cannot fully guarantee even that, because their environments are not built to isolate one customer’s data completely from the rest of the platform. Sovereignty goes further, covering who can legally compel access to that data regardless of where the servers sit.
Will Europe’s New Rules Ban Amazon, Microsoft and Google From Public Contracts?
No. Private companies can still choose AWS, Azure or Google Cloud without restriction under the proposed rules. The sovereignty tiers apply only to the most sensitive public sector workloads, such as defense, law enforcement and border management, where regulators want stricter guarantees against foreign legal reach.
