A Nobel laureate and a former EU commissioner urge urgent AI action for Europe
Their strategy outlines five key steps for Brussels, all to be achieved within the year.
Vestager criticizes European governments’ approach to AI: She believes they are not taking artificial intelligence (AI) seriously enough.
September 14, 2026 – 12:00 am
European Commission headquarters (Image source: HJBC via Shutterstock.com)
Currently, Europe accounts for approximately five percent of global AI data center capacity. A group of prominent European figures has proposed ambitious targets to increase this share to fifteen percent by 2030. This translates to building three times the existing capacity while the global total continues to grow.
The authors include:
- Philippe Aghion, Nobel laureate in economics
- Margette Vestager, former EU commissioner
- Monika Schnitzer, chair of Germany’s council of economic experts
- Marta Kwiatkowska, professor of computing systems at Oxford University
Their Transformative AI Strategy for Europe: A Warning or a Blueprint?
"We cannot allow Europe to become a playground for foreign powers," emphasizes Vestager. "AI will accelerate changes in our personal lives, education, and jobs."
The strategy suggests harnessing European strengths, such as ASML’s lithography machines, to gain an advantage in the global AI race. It calls for:
- Wider European collaboration: Forming alliances among willing member states to leverage existing chokepoints in the AI supply chain.
- Moving frontier AI expertise closer to regulators: Ensuring that officials can keep pace with the technologies they regulate.
- Setting a compute target with conditions: Requiring companies building on European soil to demonstrate benefits to local communities.
- Strengthening infrastructure and crisis resources: Preparing for potential cyber, biological, or loss-of-control incidents.
- Leading in assurance technology: Developing hardware whose security and use can be proven, crucial for hosting others’ frontier models.
Beyond these specific proposals, the strategy advocates:
- Trading economic leverage for guaranteed access to foreign AI models to foster European growth.
- Treating AI safety as an engineering problem rather than a political one.
- Shifting enforcement of the Code of Practice on systemic risk to technical assessments.
- Protecting workers from labor market shocks proactively, not reactively.
Europe has been attempting to expand its AI manufacturing capabilities through initiatives like the Commission’s €30 billion program for seven AI gigafactories, which has encountered delays and challenges in attracting partners.