On June 12, a decision taken in Washington was enough to deprive the entire world, including Europe, of the two most powerful artificial intelligences ever deployed.
On June 12, a decision taken in Washington was enough to deprive the entire world, including Europe, of the two most powerful artificial intelligences ever deployed. We knew our continent was dependent on its chips and its cloud; here he is dependent to think.
Can Europe still capture the value of a revolution that it no longer controls?
A cut from elsewhere
We knew Europe was dependent on the American cloud, Nvidia chips, and servers hosted across the Atlantic. We discover it suspended in the regulatory mood of Washington. On June 12, in the name of national security, the US government barred access to its two most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to any foreign national anywhere in the world. Unable to verify the nationality of each of its users, their publisher, the Anthropic laboratory, had to deactivate them for all of its customers, Americans included.
The pretext is a security breach. The effect is clear: what constitutes the technological frontier can be extinguished, elsewhere, with a signature. The cruelest part lies in the calendar. Europe had just obtained access to these capabilities: a few days earlier, its cybersecurity agency, ENISA, had joined the closed circle of the Glasswing project, until then reserved for American companies. She lost this access before she could even use it. Washington decided without consulting us, and Europe learned the news at the same time as the rest of the world, reduced to the level of simple collateral damage.
Europe 2031, chronicle of erasure
The day before this cut, June 11, an almost premonitory report appeared, Europe 2031. Signed by researchers close to the AI security ecosystem, it is a prospective exercise, undoubtedly somewhat oriented, but the diagnosis of which is difficult to brush aside. Europe currently hosts only around 5% of the world’s computing power dedicated to AI, compared to almost 80% for the United States. The story unfolds in a formidable spiral. A vassalization primarily technological, when access to cutting-edge tools depends on the goodwill of an ally. Then economic, when value and growth are created sustainably elsewhere and our tax base is eroded.
Finally political, the day when an impoverished continent no longer has the means to make its choices. The numbers fuel this scenario. The European InvestAI plan, presented as historic, mobilizes 200 billion euros spread out until 2030, when the American digital giants alone have spent more for the year 2025 alone. Our best hope, Mistral, has the merit of existing, the only European to stand up to the giants. But, in search of a turnaround that would value it around twenty billion euros, it remains crushed by rivals ten to a hundred times larger. Its founder also acknowledged this before the deputies in the spring: the heart of the business is now the company contract, the general public model “Le Chat” no longer serving as a showcase. On the laboratory grounds, the mass seems to have been said.
The real battleground is financial
Should we therefore resign ourselves? No, on condition of moving the fight to where Europe still has a weapon: its savings. The diagnosis has been known since the Draghi report, submitted in 2024 by the former president of the ECB on European competitiveness: Europe is full of savings, but it lets them sleep. Our money is piled up in bank deposits, life insurance in euros and public debt, safe and low-paying investments. For every hundred euros of assets, a European only invests around thirty in productive assets, compared to fifty-five for an American.
The rest finances indebted states and brings in almost nothing. Our companies continue this shortcoming: they finance themselves 70% by bank credit, whereas the Americans raise 77% of their funds on the markets. Everywhere, debt rather than capital, prudence rather than audacity. We are the world’s leading savers and the most timid investors.
The Viking Strategy
I believe that we must then distinguish three gestures that we too often confuse. As consumers, first of all, we must buy European at all costs: our clothes, our household appliances, our food, our cars. Every euro spent with a producer on the continent supports a job, a factory, and tax revenue. Then comes the money that directly finances a company, on what we call the primary market: private equity, infrastructure, IPOs. He too must stay in Europe, because there the champions of tomorrow are built. Placement on the secondary market follows another logic.
When we trade shares that are already listed, without paying a euro to the company concerned, there is no longer any requirement for geographic loyalty. There, you have to think like a Viking: seek out the yield where it is, in the great American stocks, and bring back the loot to consume it in Europe. Holding Microsoft or Nvidia stock does not expose you to any dependence. Entrusting them with the operation of our hospitals or our administrations, on the other hand, puts us at their mercy. The returns are convincing: since 2008, the American S&P 500 index has returned nearly 12.7% per year, compared to 6.1% for our CAC 40. Refusing this gap out of misplaced patriotism would amount to impoverishing the continent in the name of its sovereignty.
The weapon we refuse to arm
This weapon has a name: retreat. Our system relies almost entirely on pay-as-you-go, where workers pay retirees’ pensions without ever touching the return on global markets. Its implicit return follows by construction the growth of the economy: it now converges towards 1% per year for the younger generations, very far from the markets. Furthermore, it is profoundly unfair. The most modest, whose life expectancy, including in good health, is shorter, contribute all their lives only to often die before benefiting from it, without passing on the slightest capital to their children. The assets of our pension funds represent 32% of European GDP, compared to 142% in the United States.
Draghi himself calls for developing a share of capitalization, where everyone’s savings are invested and grow over time. Oriented towards major global values, it would transform our imposed demographics into transmissible heritage. There is the choice. Undergo a vassalization that begins with technology and ends in politics, or arm our savings to once again become investors in the wealth that is being created. The Vikings did not own the land they wanted. They brought back the gold. It is up to Europe to decide whether it wants to remain the coast that is plundered, or the fleet that returns loaded.
