A Nobel laureate and a former EU commissioner say Europe has one year to act on AI

Europe runs about five percent of the world’s AI data centre capacity. A group of senior European economists, policymakers and computer scientists has now put a figure on where it should be by 2030.

Fifteen percent, which means building three times what exists today while the global total keeps climbing underneath.

Philippe Aghion won the Nobel Prize in economics, and Margrethe Vestager ran competition policy in Brussels for a decade and served as the Commission’s executive vice-president.

Monika Schnitzer chairs Germany’s council of economic experts, while Marta Kwiatkowska is a professor of computing systems at Oxford. Their Transformative AI Strategy for Europe reads closer to a warning than to a white paper.

“We cannot allow Europe to become a playground for foreign powers. Our citizens are already bearing the economic and social consequences of decisions taken elsewhere. AI will accelerate this development, transforming our personal lives and relations, learning and jobs at an unprecedented pace,” says Margrethe Vestager, former Executive Vice-President of the European Commission.

An alliance of willing member states should exploit the chokepoints Europe already owns in the AI supply chain, ASML’s lithography machines chief among them.

“From Washington to Beijing, every other major power is treating AI with the seriousness that it deserves. There can be no question that AI will drive the course of all our futures, whether in our public services or in the businesses we rely on for employment. This is why it’s not just critical but essential for the whole union to step up its efforts tenfold,” said Philippe Aghion, the French economist and Nobel Prize laureate. 

Frontier AI expertise should move inside European institutions, so that officials can follow what they are regulating. The compute target comes with a condition attached: that companies building on European soil show local communities a benefit.

Infrastructure should be hardened and crisis resources stockpiled against cyber, biological, and loss-of-control incidents.

And Europe should lead on assurance technology, meaning hardware whose security and use can be proven, which the authors argue is the price of hosting anyone else’s frontier models and the only practical way to check that international red lines are being kept.

Wider than that, the strategy asks Europe to trade its economic leverage for guaranteed access to foreign frontier models, to become somewhere fast-growing companies can scale, and to treat safety as an engineering problem rather than a political one.

Enforcement of the Code of Practice on systemic risk should rest on technical assessment, they argue, and member states should be shielding workers from labour market shocks now rather than after the shock arrives.

Europe has been trying to buy capacity for a year already. The Commission opened bidding for seven AI gigafactories in a programme worth about €30bn, and French companies put $10bn behind one site. That programme has since run into delays serious enough to alienate the partners it was meant to attract.

Renting European-hosted GPUs from American providers reproduces the dependency it was supposed to cure, and Europe’s cloud reliance is a political exposure rather than a technical inconvenience.

The strategy concedes as much through its own structure, treating access to foreign frontier models as the main task and a European frontier lab as too expensive to attempt.

Whether any of it lands depends on institutions that have spent two years arguing among themselves over how far sovereignty should go, and the strategy arrives with no costing and no legislative vehicle attached.

Vestager spent ten years inside the Commission she is now telling to hurry. Its next work programme is due within months.