Innovation
Feb 5, 2026
Soňa Muzikárová
Given the risks it faces from all sides, Europe must move past its focus on regulatory excellence. Unless it makes rapid strides toward building the physical and financial infrastructure that a domestic European AI industry will need, such preoccupations will prove to be more of a liability than an asset.
BRATISLAVA – When it comes to AI, Europe’s biggest challenge is not the sudden arrival of foreign frontier models or the proliferation of American and Chinese platforms across its markets. It is that the broader political economy of AI relies on precisely those domains where Europe is handicapped: industrial build-out capacity, compute (data centers and chips), and a genuinely unified single market that would allow for strategic scaling.
