The European Commission has recently unveiled its proposal for the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), which aims to boost the local cloud and AI industry by reshaping infrastructure, the European cloud market, and how public sector bodies can operate in the future.
CADA focuses on three major pillars: investment in research, development and innovation, capacity building — tripling the European data centre market within the next five to seven years — and a comprehensive autonomy framework, which entails four levels of sovereignty and security and new obligations for EU member states.
CADA met with a mixed reception
Thus far, the proposal has received mixed reviews. Industry associations such as CCIA Europe have called the proposal discriminatory, as the CADA would require EU member states to assess which use cases require specific sovereignty levels that non-EU vendors “would be unable to meet by default”.
Polish tech lawyer Mikolaj Barcenciewicz has previously stated that CADA should be risk-based rather than categorical, where member states’ individual approach and subsidiarity should be preserved rather than generalised.
