In 2005, in Revue Défense Nationale, Henri de Grossouvre wrote that a Europe of power would be decided not by institutions but by the mastery of sovereignty technologies. Twenty years on, compute, models, cloud and data have become exactly that.
This file needs to be read precisely, because it would be easy to overclaim.
October 2005, Revue Défense Nationale no. 679. Henri de Grossouvre sets Europe before a stark choice: a Europe of power built on a Carolingian core, or a Europe of markets reduced to a free-trade zone under someone else’s strategic protection.
The journal’s own presentation of the article — theirs, not ours — states that European leadership requires continental strategic cooperation in order to master sovereignty technologies.
The phrase is there, in 2005. It has not been reread in the light of today: it is dated, published, consultable.
What followed
What came next is not a reconstruction. It is marked out by texts.
2007. In the same journal he reports on the creation of the ID Advance Aerospace & Transports grouping and of the Aerospace and Transport Industrial Campus association, near Strasbourg. A piece of industrial policy written from the inside, in a defence journal — the argument comes with a practice.
2021. He co-signs, in the file “Have we entered the post-Western era?”, an article on opportunities for strategic cooperation between the European Union and China. International technological cooperation is treated there as a condition of decarbonisation, not as an afterthought.
2024-2025. Three columns in Journal du Net. On deep learning applied to cities, where he holds the benefit to be conditional: privacy protection, data quality, compute cost, algorithmic bias. On the legal framing of AI voice synthesis, starting from the Tennessee statute, with the question of European harmonisation. On satellite data, technologies of military origin turned into planning instruments, whose obstacles he names — acquisition and processing cost, inadequate computing infrastructure.
October 2025: the argument in the present tense
On 29 October 2025, Le Figaro published a collective op-ed signed by thirty-five public figures — Luc Ferry, Arnaud Montebourg, Charles Millon and Hervé Morin, two former defence ministers, Natacha Polony, Alain Juillet, four generals, two senators, two deputies. Henri de Grossouvre signs it as “essayist specialising in international relations and European geopolitics”.
The text deals with data as a strategic asset, with French and European cloud dependence on providers subject to the extraterritorial reach of US law, with the “cloud at the centre” doctrine, and with the SecNumCloud certification issued by ANSSI. It states that data are the key to artificial intelligence.
And its central analogy — the same ambition as for nuclear power in the 1960s — is the exact restatement, in the present tense, of what was written in 2005.
What this file does not say
It does not say that Henri de Grossouvre is a specialist in artificial intelligence. He has no research corpus on the subject and claims none.
This file establishes a documented intellectual lineage, both ends of which are published, dated texts, and whose intermediate markers are too. It is a narrower claim, and that is why it holds.
The open question
It is simply put, and it has no settled answer: can Europe master artificial intelligence without mastering its energy, its networks and its data?
Twenty years apart, it is the same question as in 2005. Only the scale has changed.