EU Commission Opens Data Sovereignty Consultation — Cross-Border Access, Dependency, and Third-Country Risk Are the Focus

The European Commission opened a targeted consultation on safeguarding EU data sovereignty on July 8, 2026, running through September 8, 2026. The consultation covers four areas: data-related dependencies, barriers to accessing or using data in third countries, obstacles to transferring data back into the EU, and risks linked to third-country access to sensitive data. The exercise connects the Cloud and AI Development Act (proposed July 2, 2026 as part of the AI Continent Action Plan), the EU Data Union Strategy, and the European Tech Sovereignty Package — covering semiconductors, AI, cloud, and open source — into a single regulatory inquiry about where European data actually sits and who can legally access it. For in-house data governance teams and law firms advising on cloud, AI, and cross-border commercial infrastructure, the consultation is both a policy signal and a risk map: the Commission is collecting evidence about vendor lock-in, support chain access risks, and third-country government-access vulnerabilities precisely because it intends to regulate them. Firms whose client data flows through US-headquartered SaaS or cloud providers are in scope of the risks being mapped, regardless of where the servers are physically located — the CLOUD Act extraterritorial access issue is explicitly within the consultation's scope.