I just flew back from Paris where I attended VivaTech, and it’s clear that the topic of digital sovereignty is at the top of the policy priority list. In France this comes on the heels of a pretty awesome decade in tech. Back in 2017, French president Emmanual Macron declared his goal of making France a “startup nation.” Doing so would mean overcoming both perceived and real obstacles with respect to the structure and dynamism of the French economy. Pre-2017, the country’s biggest tech success might have been the 1990s Internet-equivalent, the Minitel!

Fast forward to 2025, and France’s tech and startup economy is now booming. Case in point: Paris just ranked as the top startup ecosystem in Europe, and France is now home to 32 unicorns.

Topping that list is Mistral AI, France’s answer to OpenAI. Since its outset, Mistal has focused on building AI models, however at VivaTech they announced a partnership with Nvidia to move towards the development of computing infrastructure on European soil.

This announcement capped off the zeitgeist that seemed prevalent at VivaTech: Europe needs to build, support and scale its own cohort of digital platforms and to lessen their dependence on US technology. As it stands, about 80% of EU spending on cloud services is captured by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Panel after panel at VivaTech noted the need to fix this.

Evidently, this isn’t new. The same zeitgeist was present in France and across Europe in the 1970s. It’s what led to the development of the aforementioned Minitel. But where that device/network failed in comparison to the World Wide Web . was in terms of international adoption. The Minitel was a French innovation, adopted  exclusively by the French market whereas the Internet (WWW) as we know it, went global.

And that brings us back to today’s efforts towards digital sovereignty, including our own efforts here in Canada. We desperately need domestic tech alternatives for both strategic and economic reasons. See this great interview with Ben Bergen at CCI on the topic.

However, using procurement or the strategic adoption of domestic alternatives is only going to create so much momentum. We need to avoid the fate of the Minitel and find ways to sell far more extensively outside our borders and integrate into what are now increasingly closed-to-outsiders value chains in other economies.

Hence why Canada’s Minister of AI, Evan Solomon, was at VivaTech extolling the values of partnerships and commercialization between Canadian and French AI ecosystems. But given the general shift amongst policy makers everywhere to seek to support and develop their respective ‘digital sovereignties’, the only way an outsider will break in is by being the absolute best in the world from an R&D and commercialization perspective. And the only way to do that will be by becoming the most effective economy on earth when it comes to both translating research outcomes into commercial ones, and in scaffolding funding, talent and growth opportunities onto the companies that show global-champion potential.