A compelling reframing. I would make one distinction: Europe has not stopped wanting the next Google; it has stopped treating a Google-like platform as sufficient evidence of technological power.

The deeper shift is from visible products to control of the enabling stack. Yet ownership of infrastructure is not the same as sovereignty. Sovereignty exists only when compute, cloud, chips, energy, data, procurement and industrial capacity can be converted into operational capability under pressure, at scale and without an external veto.

Europe’s real test is therefore not whether it funds strategic assets, but whether its fragmented national systems can function as a coherent capability architecture before the next crisis.