The four tracked areas

The division is not editorial tidiness. It is where the answers actually diverge: each area has its own instruments, its own vocabulary and its own way of failing, and an argument that holds in one collapses in the next.

The seam where they meet

A cloud estate can be certified at the highest sovereignty level Europe offers and still run entirely on imported accelerators, because those levels test who owns it, who operates it and whose law governs it, and stop before who made the parts. A defence contract cannot do the same thing, because SAFE puts a cost ceiling on non-European content at Article 16(10) and the ceiling binds.

That is one difference, and in issue.zero it was the whole story. Defence and space ran net +5 while policy and law ran net -1, in the same month, out of the same public purse. The gap was not ambition and it was not money. It was whether a European content rule was attached to the money.

Read the four areas together and the pattern is legible: where a European supplier exists, European money reaches it; where one does not, the money buys the capability from whoever has it, and no condition is attached requiring anything else. Policy decides whether such a condition exists. Compute is where its absence costs the most. Defence is where one exists and works. Industry is where the supplier either appears or does not.

What each one covers

01 Policy and law. What actually binds, from when, and which of the four sovereignty questions each instrument declines to ask. The AI Act, the Cloud and AI Development Act, Chips Act 2.0 and the Data Act, at the provisions rather than the press releases.

02 Compute and infrastructure. Cloud contracts and their exit terms, supercomputer and AI factory procurements, datacentre builds, and the accelerators inside all of it. The sovereignty claim is usually about the building; the fact is usually about the chip.

03 Defence and space. Capability programmes, primes and suppliers, launch and ground segment, secure connectivity, joint procurement. The one area where European content is a binding condition rather than an aspiration.

04 Industry, investment and R&D. State aid, research programmes, plant and capacity, and the ownership of the firms receiving all of it. Where public money goes, and who owns the recipient once the establishment test has been satisfied.

Each page carries what the area covers, which instruments govern it, and its running tally since issue.zero. The scoring is explained at Method and scoring, and the words the instruments use, along with what each one declines to test, are set out in the Dictionary.