“Digital infrastructure, invisible foundations for our economic sovereignty” | EUROtoday

On Jun 3, 2025

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Lhe Salon Viva Technology, which opens its doorways on June 11, constitutes an unmissable occasion for French corporations, celebrating the most recent feats of digital innovation. If most people is especially taken with new merchandise, we too usually neglect the underlying infrastructure that makes them attainable.

Invisible by dint of getting change into ubiquitous, digital infrastructure – from knowledge facilities to optical fibers to satellites – play a task as structuring right this moment as logistics roads or warehouses from the Roman Empire: they supply web entry, the safety of our knowledge and the functioning of important companies akin to hospitals, colleges or armies. Without them, no financial ambition is tenable, as our modes of communication, manufacturing and coordination rely upon it.

The Americans and the Chinese have understood this and make investments massively in digital infrastructure and the info financial system to ascertain their innovation, their competitiveness and their safety. In this context, it’s a precedence to undertake a strategic imaginative and prescient, integrating all key technological bricks for the competitiveness of France and Europe.

Structuring and danger -taking

If France has carried out an bold community infrastructure coverage, with a social goal of full protection of the territory, it was not accompanied by an equal financial coverage on therapy infrastructure, particularly calculation and storage, nonetheless simply as important.

This element has remained largely within the palms of the personal sector, constructed by successive changes. Today, a worldwide financial imaginative and prescient of digital infrastructure would profit from being extra supported by the general public energy articulating community, therapy and storage in a continuum logic. Because, if competitiveness implies freedom and provide insurance policies selling makes use of, it additionally requires structuring, consistency and managed danger.Read too Digital France: a rustic between skepticism and superior infrastructureIn phrases of networks (branches, cables and satellites), France has main belongings to export: innovation, safety, very excessive pace. It continues to be essential to free your self from normative constraints outlined at every European nation with protectionist and finally incapacitating intentions.

On the info therapy aspect, we should rise in energy on your entire vary of accessible and exportable technical options. This first includes a denser knowledge facilities mesh to achieve flexibility and reply to on a regular basis makes use of. We should additionally double, not less than, our intensive calculation capability to take care of essentially the most complicated scientific wants.

Finally, we should convey a decisive dedication to proximity servers with a purpose to reply to makes use of requiring low latency and excessive stage of safety, in a context of intensification of cyber assaults.

Continue the race for supercalculators

Regarding knowledge facilities, France stays torn between its industrial and environmental injunctions, its regulatory deadlines and its hints of autonomy. These contradictions penalize it within the funding race during which all European nations have launched, as a result of the required investments (80 billion invested every year by Microsoft) are out of attain, not less than within the brief time period. Spain has thus unrolled the purple carpet to the Americans by lowering the full length of development of such an information heart to eighteen months, whereas France continues to be blocked at eight years on common.

In phrases of supercalcutors, the European Union stays within the race with 20 % of the worldwide calculation energy, however, if we don’t make investments, it’s going to fall at 5 % from 2030. To keep the European market share, it’s needed to construct in France six new exaflopic calculators-an funding of round 3 billion euros {that a} enterprise standing might be carried, like what the opposite nations do.

If the domination of American and Chinese giants over the Cloud Computing is activated, it’s above all to not miss the revolution of the‘Edge Computingwhich exactly mobilizes knowledge processing infrastructure, particularly these close to their manufacturing.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

L’edgewhich may finally course of as much as 75 % of world knowledge by 2030, is considerably a part of an sufficient response to guard international interference our industrial and most important knowledge. The second is exclusive. Digital infrastructure isn’t a easy technical assist: they represent a lever for autonomy, competitiveness and sovereignty.

* This discussion board is signed by: Marie-Pierre de Bailliencourt (Managing Director of the Montaigne Institute), Nicolas Guérin (Orange secretary) and Gérard Memmi (Professor at Télécom Paris, founding member of the National Center IMT Networks and Systems for Digital Transformation).

https://www.lepoint.fr/innovation/les-infrastructures-numeriques-fondations-invisibles-de-notre-souverainete-economique-03-06-2025-2591194_1928.php