Belgium wants to build military data centers for €1 billion
Europe is at a strategic turning point. The next few years will be decisive: it will have to choose between digital sovereignty and submission to foreign powers. Belgium is investing in its autonomy.
The plan, which has just been announced as part of the 2026-2029 military programming law, provides for the deployment of these centers at several secure sites across the country to ensure uninterrupted service continuity. This infrastructure will play a crucial role in military operations, processing data from drones, satellites, and combat units in real time. It will also be used to securely store and process information from other public services.
While the project proposed by Defense Minister Theo Francken (N-VA) came as a surprise due to the size of the budget allocated, it is absolutely necessary. While Europe dreams of becoming a strategist and is stepping up its efforts to regulate tech giants, its data is still too often falling into the hands of GAFAM. Behind every stored file and every trained algorithm lies a structural dependency that we can no longer afford.
Companies versus states?
Sovereign cloud, local infrastructure, responsible AI, open source, data protection… these words must no longer be mere rhetoric. They must be actions. We can no longer wait for a geopolitical crisis or a data breach scandal to wake us up. Europe must now ask itself the following question: do we want to control our technological future? Or do we prefer to continue renting our autonomy, gigabyte by gigabyte, to foreign players?
There is a balance between national security and individual privacy, and high-profile cases have often forced governments to set strict jurisdictional limits on data. Last May, as we remember, the Microsoft account of the ICC prosecutor was suspended. The blocking of his Outlook mailbox marked a turning point in the crisis between the ICC and the United States. In response to arrest warrants issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials, the Trump administration imposed heavy sanctions on the ICC’s secretary general. Microsoft deleted his work email account, forcing him to migrate to a secure Swiss email service…
Thinking beyond geography
Global tensions between major powers have made technology and data the scene of diplomatic and commercial clashes. The war between Russia and Ukraine has brought data jurisdiction issues to the forefront, with Ukraine rapidly migrating critical data such as its population registry, land ownership, tax payment records, and education records to the cloud. On the other hand, US-based cloud service providers suspended sales in Russia shortly after the invasion.
Today, sovereignty extends beyond geography to include operations and governance. Remember the Amsterdam Trade Bank, which was sanctioned by the US government in 2022 because of its Russian involvement. Its data may have been located in Europe, but the cloud service provider with operational control was based in the US and was still able to revoke access to the company’s email accounts and associated data. Cloud providers have partnered with local operators to overcome this type of risk, with some governments and other entities requiring that it is not enough for data to reside in a geographical area; the operator of the cloud infrastructure must also be local.
Sovereignty, yes… but how far?
For the time being, the details of Minister Franken’s plan are not yet known. But one thing is certain: it is timely. It is time to make a clear choice: to build technologies that belong to those who use them. Not to a foreign power. Not to a black box. And above all, not to a handful of players who are too powerful to be challenged.
This is not about turning digital technology in on itself. It is about giving it back its freedom. Because technological autonomy is not a luxury: it is a life insurance policy for businesses, institutions and citizens.
It is time to invest heavily in our infrastructure. Digital sovereignty is not something that can be declared. It must be built, line of code after line of code, data center after data center. Are we capable of doing this? How far will we go to ensure our independence?
