The European Union imports more than 300 billion euros in digital services annually.

Omissions

• The exact phrasing 'more than EUR 300 billion' is not a published Eurostat/Commission headline figure; under the standard 'digitally deliverable services' definition the actual annual EU import value is substantially higher (roughly double or more), so the speaker states a conservative lower bound rather than the full magnitude of the dependence.
• The trade statistic measures gross imports of digitally deliverable services, not market share or concentration of US big-tech providers in cloud/infrastructure; the 'over-dependence on US big tech' part of the claim is a political interpretation that the trade data support only indirectly.
• Definitions matter: narrower indicators (e.g. digitally ordered trade or specific ICT service categories) yield smaller values than the broad 'digitally deliverable services' aggregate used here.

Sources

• PrimaryEuropean Commission – DG Trade, Memo: The E-Commerce AgreementThe EU is the world's leader in both exports and imports of digitally deliverable services, which amounted to €1.7 trillion in 2024, or 58% of the EU's services trade.
• PrimaryEurostat – International trade in services (Statistics Explained)In 2024, EU imports of services from non-member countries reached €1 374 billion, with Ireland recording the highest value (€356 billion).
• AcademicIntereconomics – 'Services at the Core: The Missing Piece of Transatlantic Trade Talks'Total trade in digitally deliverable services between the EU and the US amounted to €639.5 billion (€229.6 billion EU exports to the US and €409.8 billion EU imports from the US).
• AcademicInstitut Jacques Delors – 'Mapping the EU's digital trade'It imported digitally deliverable services valued at 256 billion USD in 2010, which increased to 410 billion USD in 2017.