How Europe Made Itself Irrelevant on AI

It wasn’t long since Europe could rightfully consider itself the world’s great workshop of ideas. For almost half a millennium, European technological dominance, from the printing press to superior shipbuilding, artillery, and, eventually, the steam machine, the Industrial Revolution, the vaccine, and electricity, all catapulted the continent to leadership and hegemony. While the rise of the United States—and, to a lesser degree, Japan—weakened and eventually undid that dominance, European nations remained solidly in the technological vanguard of humanity until as late as the 1990s. Much has changed since then.

Whereas European states were awing the rest of the world with the Concorde, advanced nuclear reactors, and the Ariane project just a few decades ago, the continent has now been relegated to the position of a peripheral, insignificant bystander in the most important technological breakthroughs of our time. Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing our economies—it will utterly transform the way humans live in virtually every sphere of their existence. Crucially, it will also radically transform the international balance of power, allowing some states to boost their productivity and power in ways far more extraordinary than the First Industrial Revolution ever did. 

The problem facing Europe is not that Europeans are less creative or capable than their American or Chinese peers. The problem is that Europe has built, brick by careful brick, a political and economic order structurally hostile to innovation. It is a system that worships precaution over possibility, compliance over experimentation, paperwork over production. Frontier technology does not and cannot grow in such soil: of the world’s 20 largest AI corporations, only one—Mistral AI SAS, from France—is European. When it comes to semiconductors, seven of the world’s ten largest corporations are based in the United States. Three others are based in East Asia. None are based in Europe. 

Training the most advanced AI models now requires immense computational capacity—vast data centres packed with high-performance chips and powered by extraordinary amounts of electricity. The United States and China are pouring hundreds of billions annually into this industrial scale-up. Both countries have been investing in their nuclear power plants, cognisant of the fact that only they can efficiently and affordably power the AI revolution. In Germany, meanwhile, a series of suicidal governments, driven to madness by Green parties and their acolytes elsewhere on the left, have annihilated the country’s nuclear sector. They have, driven by the same collective insanity, destroyed the energy partnership with Russia that for decades nourished German prosperity—while accusing anyone sane enough to refuse doing the same, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, of being a Russian Trojan horse. As German opposition leader Alice Weidel put it, Germany’s energy costs are now exorbitant. The thought of European technological sovereignty—and, with it, of European geopolitical sovereignty—is in itself farcical unless the energy problem is solved first.

Even now, while technology advances and Europe is left behind, Europeans seem more interested in “ethical AI”. Oblivious and inept, they genuinely appear to believe that sovereignty can be achieved through regulations rather than scale. It cannot. It is no use trying to rein in foreign tech conglomerates if Europe has nothing to fill the void with. Unpleasant as this might be for EU politicos, the only way to ensure technological independence is by actually doing things yourself.

These are the inevitable consequences of Europe’s extraordinary mistakes. For decades, European governments treated entrepreneurs as suspects to be monitored rather than pioneers to be encouraged. Labour markets were frozen, bankruptcy laws were made excruciatingly punitive, venture capital became scarce and disdained. Taxation became heavy, and bureaucracy omnipresent. As a consequence, Europe produced excellent research while watching others commercialise it. It trained engineers who left for freer climates. It fed other regions’ technological booms while taking no advantage of it herself.

Now the cost of this long habit of self-doubt has, alas, arrived. It will only get worse. AI, after all, is not just another industry or a fun technological gadget. It is a general-purpose technology that enormously multiplies productivity, reshapes warfare, transforms medicine, and rewires entire economies. Those who dominate it will command enormous leverage over those who do not. By neglecting these technologies, Europe has quietly accepted dependence—on foreign chips, foreign models, foreign infrastructure, foreign platforms, and ultimately on foreign policy preferences. It has surrendered strategic autonomy in the most literal sense.

The greater tragedy here is that European states still possess immense strengths: world-class universities, sophisticated industries, as well as vast engineering talent. Strengths unused, however, are strengths lost, with talent migrating and capital flying away. Every passing year, the gap widens: AI development is cumulative. Models trained today accelerate breakthroughs tomorrow. Growth here is exponential: by failing to secure a seat at the table for itself now, Europe is making it almost impossible to catch up later. 

Europe’s current predicament—and rising technological backwardness—is not accidental. It is the product of a long series of fateful choices. It is also a tale of political cowardice—of a bankruptcy of statecraft that left the most crucial policy decisions in the hands of self-interested pressure groups, irrational forces in the media, and an ever flighty public opinion. 

This suicidal irrationality, unfortunately, continues unabated. Indeed, there are those who understand how utterly—and dangerously—Europe is allowing itself to be left behind. Last year’s famous Draghi Report admitted how Europe is increasingly sterile, obsolete, and, therefore, vulnerable. His solution to the problem was, reasonably, that European nations should allocate a yearly 800 billion euros to boost innovation across the continent, following China’s own successful model of massive government support for research and development (R&D). Instead, the money is being spent funding the Ukraine war and paying for continental remilitarisation. While defence investments are welcome, necessary, and highly compatible with a policy of technological innovation, Europe’s prioritisation of the Ukraine war seems insane considering the urgent, existential need to fund industrial automation and AI. This extraordinarily foolish misallocation of resources will, unfortunately, produce long-lasting consequences. It will be bitterly regretted. 

If Europe wishes to matter today and in the future, however, it must reverse course. It must do so now. It must break free from the shackles of the Brussels mandarinate, and, with its nations taking back responsibility for their futures for themselves, it needs to restore the continent’s flow of cheap, abundant, and clean energy. With that most important of steps completed, it will need to loosen the regulatory straitjacket that impedes growth, mobilise capital, welcome risk, and restore a culture of ambition and achievement that treats technological progress as a public good, not as a private nuisance. This requires a sense of technological optimism among conservatives. Ultimately, civilisation is a fragile construct that can only be kept dynamic through power. If Europe is to remain Europe in any meaningful sense, Europeans will have to make sure they are strong enough to hold their ground.