This is the field where it would be easiest to overclaim. It therefore deserves to be set out precisely.
What the 2005 text says
In the October 2005 issue of Revue Défense Nationale, Henri de Grossouvre places Europe before a 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 states that European leadership requires continental strategic cooperation in order to master sovereignty technologies.
That formulation is not ours. It is the journal’s, in 2005.
What it became
In October 2025 he co-signed, in Le Figaro, with thirty-four other signatories — Luc Ferry, Arnaud Montebourg, two former defence ministers, four generals, two senators — an op-ed on digital sovereignty. The text deals 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 ANSSI’s SecNumCloud certification. It casts data as the key to artificial intelligence. And its central analogy — the same ambition as for nuclear power in the 1960s — restates in the present tense what was written twenty years earlier.
What lies between the two
The continuity is not a retrospective reconstruction: it is marked out.
In 2007, in the same journal, he reported on the creation of the ID Advance grouping and the aerospace and transport industrial campus near Strasbourg. A piece of industrial policy written from inside. In 2021 he co-signed an article on opportunities for EU-China technological cooperation around decarbonisation. In 2024 and 2025 he published three columns: on deep learning applied to cities, where he holds the benefit to be conditional — privacy, data quality, compute cost, bias; on the legal framing of AI voice synthesis, starting from the Tennessee statute, and on the case for European harmonisation; on satellite data, technologies of military origin turned into planning instruments, whose obstacles he names rather than passing over.
What this field is not
Henri de Grossouvre is not an artificial-intelligence researcher and this site will never present him as one. He has no research corpus on AI, and claims none.
What he has is an argument set out in 2005 on the technological condition of European autonomy, an industrial practice that went with it, and a position published in 2025 that restates it in the present on the ground of data and compute. That is a different thing, and a sturdier one, because every link is dated and linked.
The question that stays open is the one the file poses: can Europe master artificial intelligence without mastering its energy, its networks and its data?