For much of the last three decades, Europe has played a back-footed role in the digital economy: influential in regulation, strong in research, but rarely the place where globally dominant technology companies are built. The internet era created extraordinary wealth elsewhere. The same holds true for the recent AI wave, mainly driven by online chatbots created by the data-rich Big Tech giants which have grown up in the internet era. Europe, despite its talent and financial strength, became the least competitive of the major digital economies—and the resulting gap in value creation has grown into the trillions.
That story is well known. What is less appreciated is that a second innovation wave in the emerging AI era may offer Europe something rather rare in technology development: a historic second chance.
Artificial intelligence today is largely about bigger foundation models mainly trained on internet data; larger data centers; and ever more capital-intensive computational scale. This is where the vast majority of investment capital currently goes. Nobody can know today if these huge bets, often framed as a race to “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, will in the end pay off for the latecomers to the Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic gamble.
