Tech leaders are calling on the EU to match the US government’s $500bn AI infrastructure plan, saying the bloc needs to up investment if it wants to remain competitive in the field.
Announced by US president Donald Trump on Tuesday, the Stargate Project is a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, Japan’s SoftBank and MGX, an investment company run by the United Arab Emirates government.
The venture, which began before Trump took office, announced $100bn of funding would be made available immediately, with the rest to follow over four years.
“This should be a wake-up call for Europe,” Verena Pausder, chairperson of the German Startup Association said in a statement. “The Stargate Project is an unequivocal claim by the USA to leadership in the field of AI.”
Pausder underscored the need for a capital markets union and the need to mobilise more money from institutional investors for venture capital.
Antoine Moyroud, partner at VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which counts French AI startup Mistral among its investments, tells Sifted the French government alone could unlock around $10bn of investment by delinking pension rises from inflation.
“If you believe AI is part of Europe’s future, you need to think about all options, even ones that may be politically challenging to pass,” he says.
Jan Marquardt, CEO of Hamburg-based enterprise platform Zive, agreed. “Europe needs to wake the f**k up,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
“Not only are we going to miss out on the single greatest economic opportunity of our time, we’re also making ourselves completely dependent on others. No European company will function without US software and services.”
Thomas Regnier, the European Commission’s spokesperson for tech sovereignty, told Sifted: “The US is one of our closest partners. No other economies in the world are as integrated as we are. We already cooperate well on different aspects of AI, and we are ready to engage and discuss common interests with the new administration.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/eu-reaction-trumps-500bn-ai-plan/
