Without its own AI backbone, Europe will be a powerless rentier (www.euractiv.com)

Agnieszka Łukaszczyk warns that Europe is facing a strategic crisis because it lacks sovereign AI compute — the hardware backbone that now determines technological and geopolitical power. Today US firms control roughly three-quarters of global AI supercomputing capacity and most of Europe’s cloud infrastructure, while China has deployed more than a million high‑performance processors this year. Europe accounts for under 5% of global AI compute; xAI’s Colossus alone runs ~200,000 GPUs. That imbalance means European researchers, companies and public services run on foreign machines subject to other jurisdictions and export controls, surrendering autonomy in areas from defence to healthcare despite strong regulatory ambitions. Her prescription is industrial, not purely regulatory: Europe must build large-scale, cloud-based “AI gigafactories” operated by European firms, with governments acting as anchor customers to attract private capital and achieve scale quickly. This model — likened to battery gigafactories in the green transition — would keep compute, jobs and innovation on the continent while providing secure, affordable access for startups and research. With an EU target of 500,000 GPUs by 2030 deemed survival-level rather than leadership, Łukaszczyk argues infrastructure must be operational by 2027 or Europe risks losing another decade of technological sovereignty.