The heads of Airbus, ASML, Ericsson, Mistral, Nokia, SAP, and Siemens want the EU to cut rules faster, rethink merger policy, and build homegrown champions before the US and China pull further ahead.
Seven of Europe’s largest tech companies have formed a standing lobby group called the European Tech Creators with direct access to Commission President von der Leyen. The group is pushing for faster deregulation, easier mergers, and a completed single market, but the arrangement has drawn criticism over corporate proximity to policymaking.TL;DR
Seven of Europe’s largest technology companies have created a permanent dialogue with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, pressing the bloc to deregulate faster and let European firms consolidate. The group, which calls itself the European Tech Creators, collectively generates €417 billion in annual revenue, represents nearly €1.1 trillion in market capitalisation, and employs close to a million people worldwide.
“You cannot make very complex policies and then say we’re going to simplify,” ASML chief executive Christophe Fouquet told reporters in Brussels on Monday. “It’s a lot better if you do the right policy in the first place.”
The message is blunt: Europe is regulating itself into irrelevance. Fouquet, alongside Airbus chief executive Guillaume Faury, outgoing Ericsson chief executive Börje Ekholm, and Mistral co-founder Arthur Mensch, met with von der Leyen to argue for fewer rules, easier mergers, and a completed single market.
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“We have allowed the market to be fully fragmented, giving no one the scale to be competitive,” Ekholm said, echoing longstanding telecom industry complaints that Europe’s 100-plus operators serve an average of five million customers each, compared with 450 million per operator in China.
The group appears to be getting what it wants. The European Tech Creators met von der Leyen in late April, and within a week the EU’s institutions began moving toward a deal on the Digital Omnibus on AI, which postpones high-risk AI system obligations by 16 months and extends the simplified compliance framework to companies with up to 750 employees.
The provisional agreement reached on 7 May marked the first set of amendments to the AI Act since its adoption in 2024. The timeline is not purely the result of industry lobbying, as Germany had been pushing for lighter rules independently, but the coincidence of timing has not gone unnoticed.
“In AI, things are moving extremely fast,” Mensch said. “The problem we have is that in two years, it might already be too late.”
He said the Commission’s latest proposal on cloud and AI development was a step in the right direction but too slow. Fouquet has separately warned that Europe is “quite behind” in AI, pointing out that the US buys 80 per cent of the world’s most advanced chips.
Not everyone is comfortable with the arrangement. Von der Leyen’s recent appointment of Siemens chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe as the EU’s special envoy for industrial AI drew criticism from centre-left MEPs and watchdog groups who argued the Commission was too close to the companies it regulates.
Snabe holds stock in US AI firm C3.ai and sits on the board of Temasek Holdings, which has investments in Amazon, Nvidia, and Alibaba, according to Corporate Europe Observatory. The Commission has said it does not consider his Siemens role a conflict of interest, and the position is unpaid.
Fouquet defended the appointment, saying the president “asked someone from the industry to come and help, and that someone decided to go and help.” He added: “And the only way we reward that decision is by accusing that person of conflict of interest.”
The European Tech Creators model, a standing group of CEOs with regular access to the Commission president, mirrors the government-industry relationships the group says it envies in Washington and Beijing. Airbus chief executive Faury framed it plainly: “If it is a lobbying exercise, it’s a lobbying exercise for successful Europe.”
Whether Europe’s current deregulation push produces genuine competitiveness or simply lighter oversight of its largest incumbents will depend on which policies the group helps shape, and which ones it helps kill. The Commission has also published draft revised merger guidelines, the most significant overhaul in two decades, which could make it easier for European firms to consolidate.
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