Speech at the Data Sovereignty Coalition Kickoff event on June 10th, 2026
Thank you for the invitation to this important event.
It’s always a bit stressful to speak to an audience much smarter than I am, but I’ll do my best.
I received my invitation to speak via Microsoft Outlook. I wrote this speech using Google Docs, hitting keys on a Lenovo laptop. I coordinated with my assistant via Slack to fit this into my calendar. I have an iPhone in my pocket, with which I hope to take a photo to share on Instagram and LinkedIn.
None of these solutions are European, let alone Finnish. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg—the front-end stuff. The back office of our digital economy and society is also dominated by foreign providers.
According to research led by Professor Vili Lehdonvirta, around two-thirds of our public services run on cloud infrastructure provided by just three American tech giants.
Technological power is economic power—and political power, too. We cannot be fully sovereign if we are critically reliant on actors outside our own legal jurisdiction. This year has been a wake-up call, but merely recognizing a problem is not enough. Digital sovereignty requires action now.
We shouldn’t cut our ties or cooperation with the world outside Europe. But we do need to achieve a more balanced position and derisk our digital dependencies.
We need action on many fronts. In the political domain, we must have the will to invest and to spend tax money in ways that benefit our economy and security as a whole. In the economic domain, we need to create fully functioning and competitive European markets with easy access to capital. Here, too, politics matter: public procurement is a powerful lever that we need to use more decisively.
And in the technology domain, we need competence and capabilities in hardware—from energy to data centers and networks—in software throughout the stack, and in data gathering, control, and ownership, to operate and compete in the market. Above all, we need skills: skilled, talented people.
It is obvious that this can only happen at the necessary scale through private enterprises. As politicians, we need to create policies that enable and support this. But we are not the ones who will make it happen. We need the private sector for that. I also think we need you to educate and inform us about the situation and what needs to be done.
Luckily, we have excellent know-how here in Finland. And I’m truly glad to witness this new initiative: the coalition of the willing gathered by Code from Finland.
Often, we hear that achieving digital sovereignty takes time—5 years for this, 10 years for that, and so on. But change is not a function of time; it is a function of action.
The more we act, the faster we learn. The faster we learn, the sooner we lead.
Achieving digital sovereignty is realistic on whatever timeline we commit to.
Waiting for change instead of making it is not a viable option.
So let’s get to work. Let’s build a Finland—and a Europe—where our digital future is in our own hands.
