Essays
A weekly long-form take on the people, deals and policy decisions shaping AI in the European AI landscape. One piece each Sunday.
Essay European AI Factories Are Right in Principle and Wrong in Scale: Here Is How to Fix the Budget
Europe's AI Factories programme, built atop the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, is the most credible attempt yet to build sovereign compute at continental scale. The direction is correct. The money is not even close to sufficient. Three specific budget reallocations could change that, and the window to act is narrowing fast.
Essay Italy's Dual-Track AI Strategy: Vatican Ethics Meets Brussels Compliance
Italy has carved out one of the most distinctive AI policy positions in Europe, threading Vatican-backed ethical frameworks together with rigorous EU AI Act compliance. Whether the Meloni government can sustain both threads simultaneously, and turn that duality into genuine soft-power export, is the central question for Italian AI in 2025.
Essay European AI Fundraising in 2026: The Headline Numbers Are Flattering a Fragile Picture
European AI startups raised roughly $19bn in 2025, more than doubling the 2023 total. But strip out the mega-rounds from Mistral, Helsing, and Wayve, and the underlying deal count tells a far more cautious story. Here is what the 2026 round count will actually look like.
Essay Weights Without Substance: Why European Open-Source AI Will Shrink to a Label Within 18 Months
Mistral and Aleph Alpha built their European credibility on open-source rhetoric. But the EU AI Act's general-purpose AI provisions are quietly making full openness unaffordable. Within 18 months, expect 'open' to mean weights-only, with training data locked behind closed doors and commercial riders attached to everything else.
Essay European AI Talent: Stay, Drift, or Come Back - The Compute Argument That Changes Everything
European-trained ML PhDs keep leaving for the US, and visa reform has not stopped the flow. The real answer is compute access at scale. This essay makes the technical and political case for European GPU collectives that could finally make the continent a place researchers choose to stay.
Essay The EU AI Act at Year Two: A Scorecard That Demands Harder Choices
The EU AI Act has been partly enforceable for a year. Some parts have worked better than expected; others have created genuine regulatory gridlock. This scorecard identifies what the AI Office got right, where the general-purpose AI rules are failing in practice, and why the scheduled 2027 review should not wait.