On June 4th the EU is due to publish its ‘International Digital Strategy for Europe’. According to a draft of the strategy document seen by Bloomberg: “The network effects that allowed online platforms to grow to unprecedented size are being replicated in the race to dominate artificial intelligence. This means decoupling is unrealistic and cooperation will remain significant.”
It’s a far cry for calls for ‘technological sovereignty’ made by many of the less realistic Euro-politicians.
When a single company, Meta, can budget $60 billion for AI investment this year, and TSMC can budget $165 billion to build fabs in the US, the weakness of the EU which could only put up €5 billion of its own funds to support the EU Chips Act, becomes starkly apparent.
Even the comparatively shabby role of becoming the world’s digital regulator looks like being denied to the EU. President Trump rubbished the EU tech rules as being unfair to US companies and the EU has been looking to soften their effect in a bid to get favourable, or at least less unfavourable, trade terms with the US.
Despite successive European efforts to match US techno-dominance, nothing much has changed in the last 40 years. At a conference in Vienna in the 80s it was claimed that Europe’s semiconductor industry was becoming internationally competitive.
When I asked AMD’s founding CEO Jerry Sanders what he thought of the claim his reply was: “Nuts”.
