Forrester’s 2027 European Predictions: Despite A Strong Desire To Regain Its Digital Sovereignty, Europe Will Selectively Reset, Not Sever, Key Technology Relationships

New AI sovereignty and platform governance rules will signal strategic intent but deliver limited near-term impact

According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2027 European predictions, unveiled on September 30 at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Forum EMEA, Europe will enter 2027 determined to recover its digital autonomy, but the gap between its ambition and control will widen. More than half of European companies embracing AI will reduce their dependence on US hyperscalers due to sovereignty concerns, moving their critical data and applications to European providers. A lack of end-to-end sovereign alternatives, however, will require consumers, companies, and policymakers to pursue selective digital autonomy, which consequently will reshape consumer behaviours, cloud choices, mobility, resilience, and trade strategy with China.

Forrester’s Predictions reports offer forward-looking insights into trends to help executives and their teams anticipate change, reduce uncertainty, and make confident decisions ahead of market shifts. Key highlights from the Europe 2027 predictions include:

• China will trigger manufacturing job losses before the EU levies 25% tariffs. China’s next export wave, led by electric vehicle batteries, solar components, and manufactured parts, will place increasing pressure on Europe’s industrial base, particularly in manufacturing-heavy economies such as Germany. European policymakers will respond with stronger tariffs and safeguards but not before competitive pressures result in job losses and market disruption.

• Chinese and American robotaxis will meet for the first time on Europe’s roads. Europe will become the first region where autonomous mobility services from major Chinese, US, and European providers compete side by side. Consumers will judge robotaxi providers primarily on convenience, cost, and service quality while policymakers and regulators navigate the geopolitical implications of autonomous transportation.

• A quarter of UK teens will embrace digital restraint to express their identity. Rather than measuring status through constant connectivity, young consumers will increasingly use digital abstinence as a signal of confidence, discipline, and self-expression. This shift will create new challenges and opportunities for brands seeking to engage younger audiences.

“Europe wants more control but not at the cost of isolation,” said Martin Gill, vice president and research director at Forrester. “In 2027, the organisations that succeed won’t chase sovereignty for its own sake. They’ll make deliberate choices about the capabilities that require greater control while recognising where flexibility creates greater value. The goal isn’t digital independence. It’s balancing control, resilience, innovation, and economic reality.”

Europe. Forrester’s Europe note, from Martin Gill, is that 2027 is the year leaders stop talking about sovereignty and start choosing what to localize, what to protect, and which global dependencies still make sense. New AI sovereignty and platform-governance rules will signal intent and deliver limited near-term impact. The practical outcome is a selective reset of US cloud, Chinese industrial trade, and autonomous mobility, not a severance. Gill’s test for companies is deliberate choice: control where it matters, flexibility where it creates more value.

Environmental sustainability. Abhijit Sunil’s 2027 sustainability preview treats AI’s next constraint as power, water, and land, not model quality. US data-center power demand is forecast to more than than double, from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 66 gigawatts in 2027.

Forrester expects at least two countries to levy tariffs or equivalent charges on data-center operators and builders so households are not left paying for stranded grid capacity.

Community-impact reviews become the gate for new sites: a Gallup poll found 71 percent of Americans oppose an AI data center nearby, lawmakers introduced at least 375 data-center bills in 2026, and local opposition disrupted at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026. In Europe, digital product passports survive any regulatory retreat.

The Commission opened its registry and testing environment in July 2026, ahead of the 18 February 2027 deadline for certain large batteries. The full client report adds two further predictions. The public line is that winners will not argue about the sustainability label. They will plan AI, energy, water, land, and community impact together.

Media and advertising. Mike Proulx, Emily Collins, and Nikhil Lai frame 2027 as the year Big Media’s growth engines hit a limit and pivot. Subscriptions are harder to find, linear audiences keep shrinking, social platforms face new caps, and search is giving way to AI-mediated answers. Deal noise is part of the backdrop: FOX buying Roku, Comcast splitting NBCUniversal, Paramount fighting for Warner Bros. Discovery, Meta retooling after its youth-social settlement, Google rebuilding search around AI answers. Three public calls: at least three subscription streamers launch free tiers, with Disney+ and Netflix the likeliest and a third delayed by ownership uncertainty; Meta launches the first scaled ad platform for AI glasses, after selling more than 7 million units and settling youth-social claims for $17 billion; conversational ads become a multibillion-dollar channel as Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft, and OpenAI compress discovery, evaluation, and purchase into one interaction. The client report has five predictions in total.

Cybersecurity and risk. James Plouffe’s preview calls 2027 another “hold my beer” year, mixing bleeding-edge AI failures with old-fashioned physical disruption. An AI negligence lawsuit forces a CEO exit or leadership change at a large company, with the issue not whether the model failed but whether leaders exercised informed judgment before delegating decisions they could not explain. An AI-generated bug or regression causes a global outage across industries, as AI-assisted vulnerability discovery outruns code review and quality assurance. Mother Nature causes an outage and an NIS 2 violation for an EU entity: a wildfire or similar event takes a critical service offline, and confusion between security, IT, and facilities misses the 24-hour reporting window. Forrester cites a July 2026 voltage drop that knocked out cooling at a Google Cloud data center and disrupted service for nearly 15 hours. The gated report adds two more: more than $1 billion spent on AI tokens, and a breach caused by switching models to control AI cost.