The EU signs up to Pax Silica, the US-led chip pact France called colonisation

The European Union is set to join Pax Silica, a US-led initiative to coordinate AI chip supply chains and export controls against China, despite France's criticism that the pact amounts to colonization and contradicts the EU's tech-sovereignty agenda. The decision highlights the tension between Europe's desire for strategic autonomy and its reliance on foreign semiconductor supply chains.

Brussels is joining a Washington-led effort to secure AI chip supply chains, a fortnight after unveiling a tech-sovereignty agenda built on the opposite instinct. The European Union is set to join Pax Silica, the US-led initiative to coordinate AI chip supply chains and export controls against China. The decision is awkwardly timed. It arrives just as Brussels has been promoting a tech-sovereignty agenda whose entire premise is reducing Europe’s dependence on foreign suppliers, including American ones. Pax Silica was launched by Washington in December 2025 to secure global supply chains for AI semiconductors, critical minerals, and advanced technologies, and to bind a chosen group of partners into a coordinated stance on export controls. The UK, Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia have already signed on. So, individually, have three EU member states: Greece, Finland, and Sweden. Italy has also been reported to be weighing a place in the arrangement, a sign that the pact’s pull inside the bloc was already running ahead of any collective decision. The mechanics ran through the bloc’s usual plumbing. Member states’ permanent representatives were expected to authorise the European Commission to join on behalf of the EU as a whole, according to Agence Europe https://agenceurope.eu/en/bulletin/article/13878/3/eu-member-states-set-to-authorise-commission-to-have-eu-join-us-pax-silica-semiconductor-initiative . The Commission had pushed governments to sign up as a bloc rather than piecemeal, arguing that coordinating with like-minded partners on supply chains would create openings for European firms. Not everyone read it that way. France has been the loudest sceptic, framing Pax Silica as an attempt to colonise Europe and as a direct contradiction of the sovereignty agenda the EU was simultaneously selling. Paris has disputed reports that it alone held up the Commission’s negotiating mandate, but it has not hidden its discomfort. The objection is not really about chips. It is about who sets the terms of the stack Europe runs on. The tension is structural, not rhetorical. The same Brussels that wants to reduce reliance on non-European technology has concluded that, on advanced semiconductors, going it alone is not an option. Europe does not make enough of the chips that matter, and the supply chain that does is anchored in the US and East Asia. Joining a coordinated bloc is, on that reading, the realistic version of sovereignty: shape the rules from inside rather than be shaped by them from outside. Critics see the opposite. To them, signing the declaration locks Europe into an American-defined AI stack and export-control regime, trading autonomy for a seat at a table Washington built and chairs. The architecture of Pax Silica, semiconductors, computing infrastructure, energy, logistics, and critical minerals, is broad enough that membership touches most of the inputs to a modern AI economy. Either way, the direction is set. The bloc that spent the spring talking up strategic autonomy is now poised to coordinate its most strategic technology with Washington. What that means for Europe’s own chip ambitions, and for the firms hoping the Commission was right about those openings, is the part still to be written. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.