Europe wants to become an AI power, but ambition requires more than regulation. It requires compute. As the EU expands its data centres, cloud infrastructure and semiconductor capabilities, it faces a difficult balance between technological autonomy, global competition and the physical limits of AI development.
The United States and China are increasingly locked in a competition over the future of artificial intelligence, but they pursue fundamentally different strategies. While the US channels massive private investment into the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), China focuses on three core pillars: maintaining political control over AI systems, achieving technological self-reliance in semiconductor production, and promoting open-source AI models as global alternatives to Western platforms. Through initiatives like the AI+ program and its latest Five-Year Plan, Beijing aims to integrate AI deeply into industry, infrastructure, and national security rather than concentrating solely on frontier AI research.
