Draghi: Europe can have AI without oligarchs – if it wins technological sovereignty

Mario Draghi argues that Europe does not have to choose between faster growth, political independence and its own rules. In a letter to the Financial Times, the former European Central Bank president and author of the 2024 competitiveness report calls artificial intelligence “the most promising lever” for raising European productivity – and warns that the same technology could lock the continent into dependence on a handful of foreign firms. His closing line is the point of the piece: Europe can have AI without oligarchs. Only if it first takes control of the parts of the industry it can still hold.

The growth case is straightforward. The ECB’s scenarios, Draghi writes, suggest that rapid adoption of AI could add 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points a year to total factor productivity – the efficiency gains that do not come from simply hiring more workers or buying more machines. That measure has been close to flat in Europe since 2022. Without those gains, the Union’s talk of rearmament, green transition and social protection rests on a stagnant economic base.

The sovereignty problem sits on top of that arithmetic. Europe controls only a thin slice of the AI value chain. Its frontier labs cannot match American and Chinese rivals on money. It lags in advanced chip-making. It hosts less than 5 percent of the world’s AI computing capacity; the United States holds about 75 percent. If European companies train and run models on infrastructure they do not own, the productivity prize is real and the political price is a new kind of dependency.

Data is the remaining European asset

Draghi’s claim is that data is the one layer where Europe can still be sovereign – and the one with the largest growth potential. The continent holds decades of public-sector records, including health files, and a highly automated manufacturing base that already produces machine-readable industrial data. The European Commission estimates the EU data economy could exceed €800 billion by 2030, more than 5 percent of GDP.

To use that stock, Europe must store and process it on its own terms. That means large-scale data centres and computing capacity under European control. The bottleneck, Draghi says, is not only money. Demand is splintered across millions of firms. Investors will not finance gigawatts of computing if no one will sign multi-year contracts to use them.

His practical answer is to pool the purchasing power of big European companies. The model he cites is a deal by firms including ASML, Capgemini and Amadeus to buy “European Compute Units” from France’s Mistral, aiming at 1 gigawatt of capacity by 2030. Aggregated demand would create a loop: more European use of AI finances European infrastructure; that infrastructure keeps European data on European ground; that, in turn, supports European models.

Avoid replacing one monopoly with another

Draghi is explicit about the domestic risk. If pooled demand flows to a single champion, Europe will have swapped Silicon Valley oligarchs for a home-grown version. Combined buying power should therefore be spread across several suppliers and keep competition alive. He also backs progressive taxation so that the gains from AI-driven growth do not stay inside a few balance sheets.

The argument is not that Europe can outspend the United States on foundation models next year. It is that Europe still has leverage where it has data, industry and public procurement — and that it will lose that leverage if computing and storage are treated as someone else’s problem. Fail to move, and AI will still arrive. Wealth and power will simply settle with whoever owns the stack.

“Europe does not have to choose between growth, sovereignty and its own values,” Draghi writes. “It can have AI without oligarchs.” The condition is the unglamorous one: buy compute together, keep data at home, and refuse to let either American giants or a new European clique close the market.

The article in Italian by EUalive’s partner FocusEurope.it can be found here.

Caption: Press conference by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and Mario Draghi, Special Advisor to Ursula von der Leyen, on the report of the future of European competitiveness, 9 September 2024. [Europe by Satellite]