In the EU’s Arctic strategy, unveiled in October 2026, technology isn’t recognised as a priority in its own right. Yet security, climate, prosperity and people – the strategy’s four explicit priorities – all depend on cables, satellites, sensors, compute and minerals.
The strategy treats these technologies only as supporting tools and not as strategic assets that will shape competition in the Arctic. This is also why the EU really needs to establish a greater presence in the region.
To do this, what’s needed is a fully integrated Arctic digital package. This goes beyond the Arctic itself – the way the EU builds its technology presence in the region will affect the EU’s other digital partnership agreements. It will also have an impact on the EU’s foreign policy, where tech is already a tool for influence, security and partnership.
The Arctic as a tech theatre
The Arctic matters to the EU’s strategic position for at least five reasons, with only some of them being addressed in the strategy.
The first concerns critical raw materials. The strategy acknowledges that the Arctic region contains deposits of most of the EU’s identified raw materials, which are needed for chips, batteries, magnets and defence electronic components. Europe’s dependence on China for these materials, which Ursula von der Leyen stated is above 80 %, won’t be reduced without Arctic supply.
The second reason is shipping and domain awareness. As the ice retreats, new corridors are opening, and with them come shadow-fleet vessels that switch off their tracking systems. Effective monitoring and data integration will be essential to managing these new sea routes.
Third is connectivity. Subsea cables in the Baltic and the North Atlantic have already been damaged, and the European Commission responded by launching the Regional Cable Hub. A system linking Europe to Japan and South Korea via Greenland and Canada would add an extra safeguard that southern routes can’t guarantee.
Fourth, space and positioning. High latitudes are where ground stations, space-surveillance sensors and launch sites matter most, and where satellite-navigation jamming is used as a hybrid tactic.
Fifth is energy. The strategy describes the Arctic as a renewable energy powerhouse, and the combination of a cold climate and abundant clean power makes the region a natural candidate for hosting data centres.
What the Arctic strategy says – and what it doesn’t
It’s worth acknowledging what the strategy does include. It commits to an Earth observation service pilot for Arctic domain awareness, a Maritime Security Hub with an Arctic Cable Hub with ‘smart’ cables as an early warning mechanism, a polar option for IRIS² AI Factory access, data centre assessments in Greenland, and Destination Earth for climate prediction.
But there are some weaknesses too. Technology is fragmented and scattered across the security, climate and connectivity chapters, and, as mentioned above, it’s not presented as a policy area in its own right.
Compute and AI that have been offered to Greenland aren’t featured among the strategy’s flagship initiatives. The Pan-Arctic Cable remains a vision resting on feasibility studies and EUR 107 million invested to date, while the Greenland project highlighted in the strategy is only ‘under consideration’.
There are also omissions. Quantum technologies and semiconductors are absent. Cybersecurity is framed more as a threat to be managed than as a capacity to be developed. Secure navigation under Galileo is also limited to government use, thus leaving commercial users without an equivalent framework for public-private cooperation.
What’s needed now
To be truly effective, there should be four additions to the strategy, each anchored in existing EU instruments.
First, the cable needs to be funded before there’s any thought of building data centres, as compute without connectivity is a stranded terrain. The Arctic is already a priority area for Cable Projects of European Interest. It now needs a dedicated line in the 2028-34 MFF and alignment with the action plan on Cable Security.
Second is approaching the Arctic through the broader debate on dual-use technology. Unmanned systems, positioning, navigation and timing, as well as quantum sensing require cold-weather testing and public procurement. The Drone Industrial Forum and the European Defence Fund are the right vehicles to use. Concretely, 10 Arctic-relevant projects worth around EUR 260 million are only a modest base against the Readiness 2030 agenda.
Third is to write the rules for data-sharing in the Arctic, from seabed to satellite imagery. As the Maritime Security Hub will pool national, EU and partner data, it needs classification standards, access and AI-assisted analysis, and to be fully and interoperable with NATO.
Fourth is to tying Arctic minerals with the supply chain. Arctic offtake and stockpiling should be linked to the proposed European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials and to the EU’s processing capacity so that extraction in the far north doesn’t merely feed refining elsewhere.
Integrating the Arctic with the International Digital strategy
The International Digital strategy, released in June 2025, focuses on improving tech competitiveness, ensuring security for the EU and its partners, and shaping global digital governance and standards. It uses tools such as a Digital Partnership Network and the EU Tech Business Offer that bundle, among other things, AI factories, secure connectivity and cybersecurity.
The Arctic is a concrete setting where all three objectives can be pursued together – and this is also why an Arctic package would impact the EU’s other digital partnerships. Greenland is the pilot for the EU Tech Business Offer, already backed by a EUR 200 million Global Gateway package covering digital and satellite connectivity. The Digital Partnerships with Canada and Japan are already ongoing ‘nodes’ of the Digital Partnership Network, while Norway and Iceland can be linked through the EEA.
For governance, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are the venues where polar technology standards can be best promoted. The same approach could give substance to the technology alliance with Canada that was announced in this year’s State of the Union address, and a joint Arctic agenda focused on connectivity, sensing and compute could be its first real outcome.
The strategy correctly states that the Arctic is ‘close, connected and critical’. Yet it’s also becoming much more digital. If the northern neighbourhood is to become a strategic area, the Commission should develop a fully integrated Arctic digital package before the first high-level summit.
Without this, the EU will still have a strategy for the Arctic’s security, climate, prosperity and people – but it’ll be lacking a plan for the infrastructure needed for achieving it.
About the author:
Raquel Jorge is an Associate Research Fellow in the GRID unit at CEPS. She is also Director for European Affairs and Director of the Brussels Office at Adigital, the Spanish Association for the Digital Economy, within the DigitalEurope office.