EUROPE 2030

Idealism is killing Europe. Idealism is also why Europe must exist. Achieving Europe's ideals in priority areas will require Europe to become realist in others.

For decades, we have been a beacon of humanist values: reason, dignity, and compassion. We have forgotten one key lesson: values alone cannot secure our future. Without economic strength, technological capability, and strategic independence, we're bound to lose the ability to shape our own destiny and uphold the ideals we cherish.

The facts are sobering: Europe has seen little growth in fifteen years; we depend on others for our energy, our technology, and our security; we have watched transformative industries, from the internet to artificial intelligence, being scaled and harvested elsewhere.

This is not inevitable. Europe has world-class talent, leading industrial companies, and a strong market. But we are held back by a lack of realism, fragmented markets and capital allocation, a lack of governmental capacity, and a tendency to let perfect be the enemy of good.

We believe Europe must:

  • Be humble and pragmatic about trade-offs. We cannot always hold ourselves to higher standards than other powers and still expect to compete. We must focus our ethical ambitions where they matter most.
  • Invest in the foundations of sovereignty. Energy, AI, defense — these are not luxuries. They are what allow us to act independently in the world.
  • Unify where it matters. A company, a worker, a student should be able to operate across Europe without friction.
  • Build government capacity that matches the stakes. Europe's states are deeply involved in society, which means the quality of their decisions matters enormously. We must pay, train, and empower public servants to meet the complexity of the challenges we are facing.

Europe's ideals are worth fighting for. But we must first have the power to defend them. The next decade will determine whether Europe becomes a major force in the world or a bystander to history.

The choice is ours.

Manifesto

Idealism is killing Europe. Idealism is also why Europe must exist. Achieving Europe's ideals in the areas that matter will require Europe to become realist in most others. This starts with accepting the diagnosis: Europe needs to recognize that unless it drastically changes its trajectory in the coming decade, it's about to become a third-world country, at the complete mercy of the US and China. The ongoing transition towards increasingly capital-intensive economies driven by the AI revolution means that we may be in the last decade or two where it is possible for Europe to become a sovereign superpower. The symptoms, once the object of scrutiny, reveal how deep some of the challenges are and that the trajectory change Europe will need to take to succeed won't be easy and will come with trade-offs. We outline a path to victory for Europe to be an independent superpower capable of reaching the ideals it aspires to and becoming a safe harbor for everyone who aspires to such a life: privacy-preserving technologies, safe AI development, a high quality of life for everyone etc.

By Europe, we refer to a set of countries sharing humanist values which includes the EU, the UK, Norway and Switzerland; we don't refer to a specific jurisdiction. These uniting values include reason, compassion, ethical responsibility and a repeated commitment to human flourishing and dignity. While these countries are part of different political jurisdictions, they have shared challenges and much to win by acting together.

Since WW2, Europe has consistently been a humanist global power. As we are developing civilization-bending technologies such as AI or brain technology, my firm belief is that Europe needs to play a role and needs to develop the means to do so. If we want Europe to be able to remain such a beneficial power, we need to get the foundations right.

The Symptoms

As the thin-veiled fiction of the rules-based order is falling, hard power is retaking the center stage in bilateral negotiations. It has made painfully clear for Europe that it doesn't have the means of its ambitions when negotiating with China or the US on issues such as supply chain sovereignty or digital rights. The symptoms are increasingly visible for those looking in the right areas, which the value-focused political discourse has tended to ignore:

  • Economic stagnation: Europe has seen no significant growth for the past 15 years, with even economic powerhouse Germany showing a decline in exports. While GDP is not the only metric that matters, it reflects a tremendous loss in relative power; the US effectively became twice as rich in nominal GDP per capita as Europe in this short period. That has real implications such as European companies being unable to match top US salaries & thus losing in competitivity which induces brain drain, the European defense & intelligence budgets shrinking relatively to that of other superpowers, EU states facing thorny trade-offs between their aspiration to protective labor laws and pension systems with the real difficulty of balanced state budgets. Feedback loops trigger between some of these effects, such as intelligence disadvantage making it harder to build any durable technological advantage in Europe.
  • R&D & infrastructure decline: Europe has clearly declined in global R&D footprints in key domains like AI, biotechnology, and defense.
  • Technological dependence: European modern economy has been built on US and Chinese foundations, whether in hardware or software. Besides sovereignty implications, this induces ecosystem reinforcing loops where it becomes increasingly difficult to build in Europe compared to other more mature tech ecosystems, further reinforcing the imbalance between Europe and other superpowers.

Europe's Digital Stack: Built on Foreign Foundations

Market share held by non-European companies, by layer.

Smartphones: top 5 brands hold 87%, all non-European; European share estimated at ~1% (HMD, Fairphone) — Counterpoint Research (2025). Computers: top 5 hold 83%, all non-European; European share estimated at ~1% (Wortmann/Terra) — Gartner (2025). Cloud: European providers hold 15% — Synergy Research Group (2025). Office software: Microsoft 365 holds ~90% — CNBC (2026).

How did this happen? Among others, Europe missed the tech wave.

Europe Missed the Tech Wave

Europe overwhelmingly missed the unique fruits of the tech wave: large-scale mega-corporations. Ranked by market capitalization, the first European company, ASML, is the 21st most valuable company, about 10x less valuable than NVIDIA, the world's most valuable.

  • The first wave started in the late 1990s with the boom of the internet. Stanford and Silicon Valley consolidated to become the core engine of innovation. This was largely thanks to the nascent venture capitalist (VC) industry, i.e. highly risk-tolerant investors who help companies scale much faster than self-funded companies. Because software can scale drastically faster than industry and hardware, the advantage of having a strong VC industry would provide outsized returns to California in the decades to come. The winners of this first wave now dominate the economic world: Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.
  • A second wave of companies appeared in the 2000-2010s, supported by the increasingly structured Bay Area VC industry: new social media such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit; industry disruptors like Uber or Airbnb; and internet infrastructure companies like Stripe or GitHub. A large fraction of these companies would eventually be acquired by the giants from the first wave.
  • We're now in the third wave that started in the late 2010s, characterized by AI as a new general-purpose technology. This includes foundation model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and vertical-focused AI companies such as Waymo or Tesla. The ultimate winners from this wave are still to be seen, but the US has a significant headstart.

Europe can't afford to miss the AI wave. It lost its crown jewels by letting the DeepMind acquisition happen in 2014. It may already be too late, but Europe must try. Reasons for pessimism include the massive economies of scale from which AI is benefitting, making it incredibly hard to catch up. Reasons for hope include historical examples of newcomers overtaking incumbents in domains with tremendous economies of scale. The case of TikTok, created in 2016, is a powerful example. The social media industry is one where economies of scale are pervasive and where Facebook (now Meta) was an established monopoly. More recently, DeepSeek managed to efficiently fast-follow US AI companies despite significant computing power constraints, demonstrating the tremendous contribution of top talent to innovation.

Europe wasn't able to capitalize on any of these waves so far primarily due to three core factors:

  • Lack of structured VC and late-stage funding ecosystems. Europe has long lacked a risk-taking early-stage funding ecosystem. As a result, many promising ideas from the European R&D ecosystem either never leave the lab or get scaled in the US. This lack of supply of early-stage investors gives European VCs significant bargaining power, leading them to offer much lower valuations and much more extractive investment deals. This creates a natural incentive for the best European founders to raise funds or start companies in the US. Even when companies scale to the $100M or $1B level, the absence of European Big Tech with substantial treasuries and the scarcity of late-stage funds capable of acquiring companies for $10B+ creates a trend where successful European companies get acquired by foreign superpowers. Skype, a market leader, was acquired for $8.5B by Microsoft; DeepMind, an AI leader, was acquired for $650M by Google. Redirecting European savings towards filling this gap is critical for our sovereignty.
  • Lack of global clusters of talent and ecosystem. Clusters of talent create massive positive externalities. The US has the Cambridge area with MIT, Harvard & Northeastern, and the Bay Area with Stanford & Berkeley; China has Tsinghua and PKU. While Europe has Oxford and Cambridge, it needs to further scale their late-stage startup funding ecosystem. Second, European countries must unify their university selection systems so that top talent from across the continent after high school naturally consider a few key European universities. Europe curtails the massively superlinear effects of talent clustering by defaulting to a system where each national elite attends their national top universities.
  • Lack of a large-scale domestic market. Startups benefit massively from a large domestic market as an initial source of demand. Scaling across jurisdictions increases operational complexity and slows growth. To achieve a domestic market of a similar size to the US or China, Europe must unify its markets. This entails enabling a single legal entity recognized across all European countries, limiting national preference policies, and harmonizing tax regimes for startups.

Europe is Punching Way Below Its Weight on AI

Europe is currently on trend to be a minor player in AI, despite its economic weight and STEM talent. As a striking example, the EU datacenter buildout currently planned is significantly smaller than that of the UAE, a country with a 70x smaller population. Adoption of AI among European companies is among the lowest globally. Despite its massive talent pool, Europe has very few frontier AI developers. It lost ownership of Google DeepMind and has a single company which can be considered close from the frontier. This contrasts sharply with the Chinese ecosystem, which has at least three developers close to the frontier and more than ten tier-2 companies catching up fast. These problems compound: low local demand for GPUs makes investors cold, the lack of frontier datacenters risks making it impossible for Europe to train its own frontier models, creating permanent dependency.

Europe Has a PR Problem

Europe has a deep public relations problem around regulation. While partly warranted, this extends far beyond the proportional disadvantage of its regulations. The US and China also have significant regulatory overreach. In fact, administrative and regulatory burden for businesses, burden for new firms and tax compliance are all higher in the US and China than in Europe according to the OECD Product Market Regulation; San Francisco, the epicenter of the AI revolution, is one of the most politically dysfunctional cities, but does not suffer from a comparable perception problem. This likely makes it harder to attract talent, reduces the propensity of founders to build in Europe, and makes regulations less effective.

Regulatory Burden: A Multi-Domain Comparison

The story is more complex than social media pundits suggest.

Europe United States China France Germany UK
Sources: OECD Product Market Regulation (2024) · OECD Employment Protection Legislation (2019) · OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index (2020) · World Bank/PwC Paying Taxes (2020). Europe = EU-27 + UK, Norway, Switzerland.

Europe is Losing Its Industrial Edge

We see the early signs of China's industrial base outcompeting European competitors on every axis that matters: quality, price, and innovation. In stark contrast with many European industrial monopolies, which have often been protected by favorable relationships with states, China has implemented policies in key sectors that incentivize ruthless internal competition. The winners that emerge are battle-hardened and crush international competition once they begin exporting thanks to their very low prices. Europe can learn a lot from the way China performs industrial policy and won't survive by accusing China of "overcapacity" and leaving the root problems of the loss of competitivity of its industry untouched.

Europe's Energy Policy Disaster is a Ticking Bomb

The disastrous energy policy of many European countries in the 2010s, most prominently Germany, is a prime example of idealism leading Europe to shoot itself in the foot. By shutting down nuclear reactors without sufficiently scaling other energy sources, Germany created a tremendous dependency on Russia and the US and induced a massive energy price hike. As a result, European's power generation is the same as it was in 2000. Energy is the lifeblood of modern society. Cheap energy enables manufacturing to thrive, is a key bottleneck in the race to AI dominance, and tremendously increases international influence.

Electricity generation chart showing China surging past 10,000 TWh while Europe remains flat around 4,000 TWh and Germany and the UK stay below 1,000 TWh
Total electricity generation by country/region (TWh). Source: Ember (2026), Energy Institute — Statistical Review of World Energy (2025)

The failure is such that Europe cannot afford any more idealism in the energy realm. To remain competitive and reduce its massive external dependence, it must scale energy generation of all kinds as quickly as possible. This will entail trading off some of its values and require a return to realism in the short-term:

  • Scale solar, batteries, and wind turbines. Catching up to the rate of China and the US will require removing environmental reviews and other permitting regulations that drastically slow energy and renewable growth in Europe, often by years. As an example, wind turbine projects can take up to seven years to receive permitting while the project takes two years to build. Importantly, solar power has been a renewable technology that has reached extremely low prices, enabling a wide deployment and rapid scaling of energy supply. The bottlenecks to deployment are largely regulatory and related to permitting. As a reference, China has installed more than 4x more solar capacity in the first half of 2025 than Europe in 2025.
  • Scale gas. Natural gas is a necessary transitional fuel to ensure grid stability and energy independence in the short to medium term.
  • Reopen the fracking debate. It is hypocritical to ban fracking locally only to rely on imported fracked gas from the US, placing us in a highly uncomfortable dependency.
  • Scale nuclear. Nuclear power has been a historical advantage for Europe, can be made cheap and provides substantial sovereignty thanks to its energy density which allows long-term stocks. To rebuild this capability, a pragmatic approach could be to conduct joint ventures between national suppliers and South Korean firms, who have demonstrated the ability to build new reactors in as little as four years.

The more we scale solar, the less we need other sources. But we are orders of magnitude slower than the US and China and cannot rely on renewables alone to remain competitive in the short run.

Europe's Outsourcing of Its Defense is an Existential Risk

Since the 1990s, many European powers have outsourced their defense, assuming alliances would remain stable. The result has been a continuous decrease in deterrence, leading to the unpunished 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, followed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. To increase its deterrence, Europe must make great strides in three key areas:

Military expenditure as % of GDP. Source: World Bank / SIPRI (2024). Europe = average of 19 European countries. *China's official figures are widely considered to understate actual military spending by 40-100%.
  • Drones & military Technology: With >60% of Ukrainian casualties on the Ukraine-Russia front coming from drones, it's clear they are reshaping warfare. The core of Western military doctrine—focused on a few highly expensive units—is being questioned. Whether it is €15M ballistic missiles that can take down >€10B aircraft carriers, €250k marine drones that can take down €100M ships, or €1k drones that can take down >€1M tanks, the problem is pervasive. Europe must rapidly innovate and adopt new military technologies to maintain credible deterrence.
  • Nuclear Triad: Maintaining a fully sovereign supply chain for the nuclear triad is essential. While France has emphasized this, others may need proactive policies to restore it.
  • Intelligence & cybersecurity: The Snowden affair revealed the extent to which European powers were penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies. The NSA was reading Chancellor Merkel's phone; no European agency could reciprocate. That asymmetry was not an accident — it reflects a capability gap that remains largely unaddressed. Europe collectively fields roughly as many intelligence personnel as the US (~110,000 vs ~100,000), but the US spends over 6x more per person — that gap is satellites, AI, global collection infrastructure, and computing power. The problem is not headcount; it is fragmentation across 30+ agencies with incompatible classification systems and near-zero interoperability, compounded by deep technological dependence on American cloud, semiconductors, and AI. Closing this gap requires substantially increasing intelligence budgets, building European intelligence integration from the ground up, and developing sovereign digital infrastructure for classified workloads.

Europe vs US Intelligence: Same People, Fraction of the Technology

Europe has comparable headcount but a 6x gap in technology investment per employee.

Sources: UK SIA Financial Statement (2024-25), French Senate PLF (2025), German Bundestag Budget (2025), Romania Budget Law (2025), ODNI IC Budget (FY2025), SIPRI, national parliamentary oversight reports. Many Tier 3-4 figures are estimates where budgets are classified. Personnel and budget figures should be treated as order-of-magnitude estimates.
Share of defense equipment orders by supplier origin. US & China data: European Parliament / CSIS (2024-2025). EU data: EDA Defence Data (mid-2022 to mid-2023). China's import share has dropped 64% since 2015-2019 as domestic production expanded.

Foundations: The Remedies

Leaving "Everything Bagel" Europe and Embracing Realism

The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein coined the term "Everything Bagel" to describe the phenomenon of applying highly stringent ethical values to all projects, at the expense of achieving the core project objectives. European idealism has translated into a similar epidemic. Environmental reviews and court challenges have drastically slowed the development of renewable energy; environmental concerns have stalled the installation of air conditioning, leading to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from heatwaves. To succeed, Europe must become laser-focused on achieving the core objectives of its policies. It is behind on so many sources of hard power that it can no longer afford to systematically impose on itself harder ethical constraints than other superpowers. It must pick its battles and regain its strength before it can afford to be ambitious in how it achieves its goals.

Sources: SaurEnergy (2025), WindEurope, WEF (2024), EU Commission REPowerEU tracker. No single regulation is unreasonable — but environmental assessments, grid queues, spatial planning, court appeals, and administrative delays all stack onto every project.

Making European Governments World-Class

Europe's governments are significantly involved in managing society. This can be a strength, but only if those governments are highly competent, especially in expertise-heavy domains like technology policy. A few key policies could facilitate this:

  • Increase government wages to match the private sector. To attract and retain top talent, compensation must be competitive. Considering the scale of government spending, the return on investment from hiring more competent decision-makers would be immense.
  • Encourage specialization in expertise-heavy roles. Technology policy benefits from deep understanding, which requires specialized career paths within government, rather than promoting generalists.
  • Let talent thrive and take risks. Technical experts who join government need to be given significant ownership and respect for their expertise, akin to methods in the private sector, to prevent them from leaving due to an inability to execute their mandate. Importantly, they must be able to take non-consensual decisions and be rewarded if these pay off.
  • Implement periodic reviews of existing regulations. Europe, and the EU in particular needs a systematic process to review all regulations for necessity, redundancy, and unintended consequences. This could be inspired by institutions like the UK's What Works Centre, ensuring the legal apparatus does not become obsolete or counter-productive.

Furthermore, AI must be implemented widely in government to massively increase efficiency and deliver better, more customized services to citizens. This requires avoiding overly burdensome deployment conditions that stifle adoption and ensuring civil servants are continuously trained to recognize and adopt useful AI applications as they emerge.

Resolving Europe's PR Problem

Jointly with a policy aimed at more systematically making European governments competent, Europe should aim to remove symbols of regulatory mistakes. This is an irreplaceable part of a policy aimed at making Europe a stronger option for entrepreneurs and top talent:

  • Remove symbols of regulatory failure as soon as possible. The most prominent example is the cookie banner. It should be removed and replaced with a browser-level standard that achieves the same GDPR goal, i.e. letting users deliberately choose what data to share, without the massive user experience cost and reputational damage.
  • Appoint highly technically savvy representatives on technical topics. To combat the perception of an incompetent bureaucracy, external-facing policymakers on topics like AI, health or biotechnology must be deeply knowledgeable and credible.

PR resolution problems should go along policies that make Europe a better home to fast-growing companies that are the defining feature of economic superpowers in the XXIst century.

Market Unification

Market unification is an irreplaceable policy that has to happen for Europe to have a chance to be competitive. On market unification issues, the Draghi report on EU Competitiveness goes very in-depth on the problems and solutions. Without substituting this report, here are key measures that feel particularly important to us:

  • Unleash private capital: Complete the EU Capital Markets Union (CMU) to create a deep, integrated pool of capital. Critically, this includes boosting allocations from insurers and pension funds, Europe's vast savings pools, to venture capital and growth equity to fund the next generation of companies.
  • Market unification: Create a single, seamless market for goods, services, and labor, removing the national preferences and frictions that still fragment the continent and slow down scaling companies.
  • Legal unification: Streamline legal frameworks to reduce complexity for cross-border operations. The creation of a single "EU Corp" legal entity is a vital step.
  • Debt unification: Mutualize debt at the European level. A common European bond market would dramatically increase liquidity, bolstering the euro's position as a credible global reserve currency and lowering borrowing costs for all member states.

Along with paving the way for high-growth startup, Europe should invest in protecting its core historical strength in industries and manufacturing. This requires investing in the blood of societies, energy, but also to do economic policy differently.

Energy & Industrial Basis

Here's a collection of what Europe should strive for in the energy & industrial realm:

  • Foster competition: Numerous European industrial leaders are exposed to little competition, sometimes because of government expenditures shielding them from such competition, like in the case of the tariffs on Chinese vehicles. While such protections can make sense to protect a nascent rising industry, it is simply postponing the inevitable decline of industrial leaders at great cost to the taxpayer than to simply protect them without credible strategy towards increasing their competitivity. Making national European markets more fungible is a key way to increase competition inside Europe and thus make industry leaders more competitive internationally. A key ingredient essential to the success of Chinese exports is the ruthless competition local companies have been exposed to in their growth stage, leading the winners of the competition at the consolidation stage to be extremely competitive on international markets.
  • Invert the trend: Current European industrial players that are most competitive, such as German manufacturers, are declining in face of international competition. Inverting the trend at a macroscopic level will require deliberate and sustained industrial policy that offers them advantages they can leverage to be internationally competitive. One of the largest strengths of Europe is the rising Eastern countries who, contrary to Western Europe countries, have been growing fast and have become highly capable of building infrastructure at scale and rapidly. Leveraging the thriving ecosystem from these countries to restart the growth dynamic in Western manufacturing and industrial capacity may be a promising area. Encouraging joint ventures between Western European companies that are constrained significantly by high energy costs and permitting preventing them to build and Eastern European companies could be a promising way to foster a new dynamic among Western industrial sector.

Manufacturing Production: Western Decline, Eastern Rise

Industrial production index (2021 = 100), seasonally adjusted.

Source: Eurostat, Industrial Production Index (sts_inpr_m), NACE Rev.2 Section C (Manufacturing), seasonally adjusted. Since 2019: Germany −14%, Italy −7%. Poland +28%, Greece +27%, Lithuania +39%.
  • Make energy cheap: One of the key costs of productions of most manufacturers and industrial players is energy. As a result, driving energy prices down is a key enabler for national champions to be competitive internationally. Symmetrically, unpredictable energy prices or high energy prices tend to kill many manufacturing industries, given how low-margin manufacturing typically is and that it requires substantial upfront investments that become too risky if energy costs are unpredictable. Thus, European countries should have among their top priorities to be scaling production of energy, including power, through all types of sources.
  • Cut red tape: Numerous regulations and measures that were developed in an era where international competition was less significant and where velocity mattered much less than it does today prevent Europe from being an attractive place where to build factories, invest or scale up a manufacturing company. Robotics is one area benefitting tremendously from trial and error and whose growth in Europe might be curtailed by heavy restrictions that don't exist in China or the US and enable faster development.
  • Reduce external dependence on minerals: By making it essentially impossible to open new mines on its soil by a mix of permitting, environmental review and protective measures, Europe effectively delocalizes mining of many core raw material and minerals critical to its supply chain, thus outsourcing the negative externalities of mining in countries most often less equipped to deal with such externalities. To change this trend, Europe will need to relax all of these policies and bear the cost of technology development on its own soil, regaining elements of sovereignty by the same token.

Critical Minerals: Europe Doesn't Mine What It Has

EU import dependency and domestic production for key minerals.

Sources: European Commission, Critical Raw Materials Act (2024); IEA, Global Critical Minerals Outlook (2025). * = significant known EU reserves exist but are not being mined due to permitting constraints. Dashed line: CRMA (Regulation 2024/1252) benchmark: 10% of annual consumption from EU extraction by 2030.

Fostering Innovation

Europe's innovation ecosystem is weak compared to the US and China. Despite the significant basic research and R&D capabilities of European countries, Europe struggles to convert that into successful companies. 10 years ago, most European countries had barely any startup ecosystem. Over the past 10 years, several countries such as France have grown a promising ecosystem, reaching over 30 unicorns since then. While the trend is positive, Europe is still lagging behind in part due to remaining frictions that have to be adjusted to increase Europe competitiveness in highly competitive sectors:

  • Labor costs: State-induced labor costs remain very high, making wages uncompetitive internationally and hindering talent attraction. These costs should be reduced, especially in high-growth tech sectors where employees already have significant bargaining power and do not need the same level of protection as in other industries.
  • Employment frictions: Highly protective labor laws, designed for a different era, penalize dynamic companies. Making it difficult to lay off employees during downturns makes startups riskier and encourages slower, less ambitious growth. Similarly, long notice periods for managers can cripple an early-stage company's agility at critical moments.
  • EU Corp & cutting red tape: Enable the incorporation of a single legal entity recognized by all European countries and eliminate uselessly complex processes, such as the German requirement for in-person notary readings of investment deals, that add friction and slow down capital allocation.

To further increase its odds, Europe should lead a policy of high-skill visa enablements, streamlining the process and making sure it's really extremely easy for international talent to come. It is a cheap intervention that can differentiate Europe, in a context where visas are a major issues preventing talent to easily work in existing superpowers.

By their nature, startups are risky. As a result, for top talent to be more willing to take that risk, a full ecosystem is typically needed and facilitated by physical clustering of startups, VCs, talent and a highly dynamic employment market. If a market is highly dynamic, accepting a job at a startup becomes less risky because in case of failure it is easy to quickly find another job in another company already present in the network employees may have built. On the other hand, if a startup is one of very few in a city, it becomes highly risky to take a job and move there because that would prevent any safety net in case of failure.

Riding the AI Wave

Developing the AI Infrastructure

As AI is about to reshape the economy, Europe is currently barrelling towards being an irrelevant player on the international stage. As a point of reference, US hyperscalers aim to build 80-100GW of frontier AI datacenters by 2030. Europe currently has only about 2-3GW planned. To be sovereign, Europe should aim for at least 20GW. This can be achieved through two complementary paths:

  • European-owned infrastructure: Use government incentives and direct investment to spur a domestic datacenter buildout, which requires lifting the usual permitting and environmental reviews that make such projects impossible on competitive timelines.
  • Hyperscaler-driven growth: American hyperscalers are actively looking for power grids to host their datacenters. If Europe makes building possible, they will come. While not fully sovereign, having these assets on European soil is far better than having no access at all.

Managing Risks to National Security and the Human Species

Europe has a strategic interest in ensuring AI is developed safely & reliably. This means preventing rival powers from infringing on our sovereignty by developing uncontrolled superintelligence, but it also means contributing to global safety to avoid existential risk, no matter where it originates. The EU's work on risk management, such as the AI Code of Practice, is a helpful start and should be built upon.

Conducting Industrial Policy Along the AI Value Chain

Europe must build expertise and capacity in all key areas of the AI supply chain, even if full autonomy is out of reach. Having companies like Arm and ASML in Europe is a tremendous lifeline that significantly reduces the leverage that other superpowers have on Europe. Reinforcing areas of strength and reaching a minimal level of production in areas of dependency should be a key part of the European industrial policy. What may be strategic to do on each part of the supply chain:

  • Machine-tools (EUV): Europe has a monopoly via the Netherlands-based ASML produced of EUV technology which is considered one of the most sophisticated technologies humanity has ever developed. This critical advantage must be preserved and expanded into a broader ecosystem of innovation in semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Beyond supporting ASML as necessary, it should be a priority to try to turn this advantage relying primarily on a single company into a more ecosystemic advantage, by encouraging the development of EU-based EUV companies that could potentially benefit from Joint Ventures with ASML to innovate on the basic technology. Otherwise, there might come a time where Europe loses its key edge in this technology.
  • Chip assembly: Taiwan has a monopoly of the assembly of chips through TSMC, closely followed by the South Korean Samsung. While being fully autonomous in building frontier AI chips at the relevant volume is out of reach for Europe, building at least one fab capable of assembling frontier AI chips in Europe would be highly relevant to building expertise in the domain and reducing the pressure that Europe could be subject to if it had 0 manufacturing capacity in the domain.
  • Chip design: NVIDIA's lead is formidable, but its primary moat is its CUDA software stack, not just hardware. Europe should encourage an ecosystem of competitors, focusing on niches like highly efficient or specialized niches where new players such as Groq or Cerebras can thrive.
  • Foundation models: Europe possesses top talent. The government can facilitate the formation of new world-class AI labs by connecting top researchers and providing backing for crucial datacenter access. Facilitating events that help such talent to get to know each other and offering backing for permissioning regarding AI datacenter buildout may increase the odds that new relevant AI developers emerge in Europe. There is no talent bottleneck to the EU becoming a frontier AI center as dynamic as China is.

Enabling AI Adoption

The future competitiveness of the European economy will depend on its ability to integrate AI into its core industries. Removing bottlenecks to adoption should be a key objective of EU AI policy in the coming years to ensure this happens.

  • Minimize the burden of the EU AI Act and GDPR. The broad, use-case-focused parts of the AI Act risk creating a significant compliance burden that slows adoption. Its impact must be closely monitored, and its scope potentially reduced to minimize the drag on industry. Similarly, GDPR must be interpreted in ways that don't have a chilling effect on AI development.
  • Accelerate AI for heavy industry. European industry leaders are often in safety-critical sectors with a high bar for reliability. Mainstream AI models are not yet reliable enough for these use cases. Policy should incentivize the development of highly reliable and verifiable AI that can be deployed in these core sectors, turning a European strength into a technological advantage.

Roadmap to 2030

Concrete, measurable targets for each domain. Green bars indicate targets that have been set; grey bars indicate baselines awaiting targets.

Leaving "Everything Bagel" Europe

Permitting time for energy & infrastructure projects
Current
4–9 years
Target 2030
TBD
WEF, "How permitting processes hamper Europe's energy transition" (Sep 2024): "7 to 9 years… with examples exceeding 10 years"
Renewable energy queue vs installation rate
In queue
1,000+ GW
Installed / year
~16 GW
Target 2030
TBD
SaurEnergy (2025): "1,000 GW+ renewables stuck in grid queues"

Making European Governments World-Class

Regulatory sunset rate — % of existing stock reviewed per year
Current
No systematic process
Australia benchmark
10% / year
Target 2030
TBD
OECD, "Better Regulation Practices across the EU" (2025): only ~25% of Member States require ex post evaluation. Australia Legislation Act 2003: auto-sunsets all instruments after 10 years
New regulations with mandatory sunset/review clause
Current
No systematic requirement
Target 2030
TBD
Prevents future regulatory accumulation. Australia requires this for all subordinate instruments by default.
Action rate on reviews — % modified, simplified, or repealed
Current
N/A
Australia benchmark
60%
Target 2030
TBD
Australia AG Dept (2021): of 2,024 instruments reviewed, 20% allowed to sunset, 17% repealed, 23% replaced. Only 40% remade as-is.
Government tech pay ratio vs private sector
Current
No authoritative source
Target 2030
TBD
No pan-European data exists for tech-specific roles. Baseline needs primary research.
AI adoption in government services
Current
Low single digits %
Target 2030
TBD
EC Public Sector Tech Watch (2025): ~1,400 AI projects across 38 countries, ~600 implemented

Resolving Europe's PR Problem

Cookie banner eliminated
Current
Still active everywhere
Target 2030
TBD
Founder perception — % who would build next company in Europe
Current
~50%
Target 2030
TBD
Atomico, "State of European Tech" (2025): exact figure unverified — needs confirmation from report
Net high-skill migration into Europe
Current
Negative for tech vs US
Target 2030
TBD
Sifted (2025): net tech inflows fell from ~52K (2022) to ~26K (2024)

Market Unification

Pension & insurance assets in equities & VC
Europe
~25%
US
~55%
Target 2030
TBD
OECD, "Pension Markets in Focus" (2025): 29.3% figure from research agent — needs verification against report
Intra-European market barrier (tariff equivalent)
Goods
44%
Services
110%
Target 2030
TBD
Draghi Report (Sep 2024), Part A, citing IMF WP/24/219 (Oct 2024), p.19: "equivalent of a 44% tariff on goods, 110% on services"
VC investment (annual deal value)
Europe
~$60B
US
~$215B
Target 2030
TBD
PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor Q4 2024: US $215.4B across 14,320 deals; Europe ~$60B
European Corp registrations
Current
Does not exist
Target 2030
TBD

Energy & Industrial Basis

Industrial electricity price
Europe
€80–120/MWh
US
€50–70/MWh
Target 2030
TBD
New generation capacity installed per year
Current
~50 GW
Target 2030
TBD
Ember, "European Electricity Review" (2025): ~66-70 GW new capacity in 2024
Critical mineral mining permits per year
Current
Near zero
Target 2030
TBD
EU CRMA (2025): 47 strategic projects selected, of which 25 involve extraction

Fostering Innovation

Cumulative unicorn count
Current
~400
Target 2030
TBD
Employer cost to deliver $150K net salary
Paris
2.36x ($354K)
Berlin
1.91x ($287K)
Austin
1.42x ($213K)
High-skill visa processing time
Current
2–6 months
Target 2030
TBD
Fragomen (2025), Jobbatical (2025): official processing times by country

Riding the AI Wave

AI datacenter capacity
Current
2–3 GW
Target 2030
20 GW
US target
80–100 GW
Exact baseline uncertain. Multiple estimates: IEA Electricity 2025, McKinsey (2024). Range: 2-3 GW AI-specific to ~18 GW total datacenter power.
Frontier AI labs headquartered in Europe
>$10B
~1
>$100B
0
>$1T
0
European share of global AI investment
Current
~25%
Target 2030
TBD
Stanford HAI, "AI Index Report" (2025), Economy chapter. Full PDF — $109.1B US figure from search results, needs verification against report
EUV / semiconductor equipment ecosystem
Market cap
~€300B
Companies >$1B
~3
Target 2030
TBD
CompaniesMarketCap: ASML ~€270B, ASM Intl ~€36B, BESI ~€15B (Apr 2026)
Fabs producing frontier AI chips in Europe
Current
0
Target 2030
TBD
European CHIPS Act: no operational frontier fab as of 2026
Companies using AI in operations
Europe
~8%
US
~18%
Target 2030
TBD
Eurostat (Dec 2025); US Census BTOS — both figures from research agent, needs verification against source pages

Defense

Defense spending (% of GDP)
European avg
1.7%
Target 2030
TBD
NATO, "Defence Expenditures of NATO Countries" (Jul 2024, PDF) — 2.02% figure from research agent, needs verification against PDF
Domestic defense procurement share
Europe
22%
US
98.6%
Target 2030
TBD
EPRS, "European defence industrial strategy" (Sep 2024), p.3, citing EDIS (COM(2024) 150): "78% of defence equipment acquisitions… were done abroad, of which 63% were from the United States"
Collaborative European procurement
Current
~18%
Target 2030
40%
EPRS (Sep 2024), p.3, citing EDA CARD 2022: "only 18% of defence procurement is collaborative — far below the 35% agreed within the EDA framework"

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