A coalition of prominent European thinkers has released a roadmap demanding immediate intervention from Brussels, with implementation required within the current year. Among the signatories are Nobel Prize-winning economist Philippe Aghion and Margrethe Vestager, who spent a decade leading competition policy at the European Commission before serving as its executive vice-president.
The continent currently controls roughly five percent of global AI data centre capacity. The strategy sets an ambitious target: reaching fifteen percent by 2030, a threefold expansion of existing infrastructure even as worldwide capacity continues to grow.
Joining Aghion and Vestager are Monika Schnitzer, who chairs Germany's council of economic experts, and Marta Kwiatkowska, a computing systems professor at Oxford. Their Transformative AI Strategy for Europe reads more as an urgent call to action than a conventional policy document.
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.
Margrethe Vestager, former Executive Vice-President of the European Commission
Five Priority Actions
The strategy identifies several critical moves for European leadership. First, an alliance of committed member states should leverage existing advantages in the AI supply chain, particularly ASML's lithography technology.
Second, advanced AI expertise must be embedded within European institutions so regulators can meaningfully understand what they oversee. The compute expansion target comes with a requirement: companies operating in Europe must demonstrate tangible benefits to local communities.
Third, infrastructure resilience demands attention, with crisis preparedness for cyber threats, biological risks, and potential loss-of-control scenarios. Fourth, Europe should establish itself as a leader in assurance technology—hardware whose security and operational use can be independently verified. The authors contend this capability is essential for hosting foreign frontier models and enforcing international safety standards.
Beyond these core measures, the strategy recommends Europe leverage its economic position to secure reliable access to leading-edge foreign models, create conditions for rapid scaling of homegrown companies, and approach safety as an engineering challenge rather than a regulatory one.
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.
Philippe Aghion, French economist and Nobel Prize laureate
Implementation Challenges
The authors propose that technical assessment should guide enforcement of the Code of Practice on systemic risk, and that member states should begin protecting workers from labour market disruption now rather than waiting for crisis to strike.
Europe has already attempted capacity-building for over a year. The Commission launched a bidding process for seven AI gigafactories backed by approximately €30bn in funding, with French companies committing $10bn to one facility. However, serious delays have since emerged, damaging relationships with potential partners.
Renting GPU capacity from American firms operating European data centres merely perpetuates the dependency the initiative was designed to eliminate. Europe's reliance on foreign cloud infrastructure represents a strategic vulnerability rather than a mere technical issue.
The strategy itself acknowledges this reality through its structure, treating access to foreign frontier models as the primary objective while deeming a European frontier laboratory too costly to pursue independently.
Success hinges on institutions that have spent two years in internal disagreement over sovereignty boundaries. The strategy arrives without budget estimates or a legislative framework, and the Commission's next work programme is expected within months.
Source: The Next Web
