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In the keynote speech at the recent Italian Tech Week in Turin, Commission President underlined three main obstacles for the digital community to thrive in the global competition: the lack of capital, the EU single market’s fragmentation, and the “slow uptake” of new digital technologies, mainly AIs models.
Background
During last years, the EU member states have been “trailing behind the rest of the world” (in the words of the President) in the race for digital and computational power: even a year ago, the EU has had only one super-computer among the global top ten. Since then, the member states and the EU institutions have made extensive efforts to reduce the digital divide, e.g. by making the supercomputers’ agenda a top priority of the Commission’s first mandate. As a result, the EU has had presently four supercomputers in the global top ten (two of them are in Italy): they support national/regional innovative start-ups to develop, train and deploy the next-generation AI models.
These efforts “have defied the sceptics and made Europe a global leader”, notes the President and adds that “we will spare no effort to make Europe an AI continent, to make talents choose Europe, because this is the EU’s great mission of our times”.
However, “administrative resource” is still dominating in the President’s speech: “I believe that my job is to create the best conditions for developers in our continent; I want the best talents to choose Europe, and I want the future of AI to be made in Europe”, she stressed.
However, it seems rather problematic that a single person, even at the head of a strong team of civil servants (over 30 thousand in the Commission) can manage such an enormous task; the best and optimal way would be somehow to create “the right” politico-economic system with adequate personal stimuli.
Source and all citations from the Commission press release at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/da/speech_25_2285
Main obstacles
Among “too many obstacles that stand on the way”, the President features three main:
= The first and most obvious issue is the lack of funding. The President has revealed “a surprising truth: Europe does not lack capital; the continent is the world champions in saving (i.e. savings in the EU states’ households has reached already about € 1.4 trillion, compared with just over 800 billion in the United States”.
In order to progress, the EU needs the so-called risk capital and equity: thus, there are only 24 percent of the European households’ financial resources invested in equity, compared to 42 percent in the US.
To assist the transition process, the Commission suggests, at the first stage creating a multi-billion “Scaleup Europe Fund” in partnership with private investors. This fund will make direct equity investments in numerous strategic sectors: e.g. in AI and quantum, in clean technologies and sustainability, etc. The fund will support growing companies, mostly SMEs to close their funding gaps.
At the second stage, the EU is facilitating more structural solutions in the states by providing additional liquidity to the EU-wide capital market; so that companies could find the needed capital without addressing investors worldwide. This is the main idea behind the Commission’s new Savings and Investments Union, SIU: to bring financial resources to companies and developers in Europe.
More on SIU in: https://www.integrin.dk/2025/09/30/eus-savings-and-investments-union-two-new-initiatives/
= The second obstacle is the EU single market’s fragmentation. As the President notes, “it is becoming easier to expand to another continent than to move in another EU member state, with 27 different bureaucracies and legislations”. The way out is not tearing down existing legislation on European “four basic freedoms”: these agreed rules are giving the developers the needed certainty and predictability in work; but only with a vital addition – by simplifying rules and making it easier for companies to innovate.
Hence, the Commission is proposing a completely new approach to how innovative companies operate across Europe. The Commission calls it “the 28th regime”, which means that instead of tweaking 27 national systems to bring them closer, the solution lies in starting something completely new: early next year, the Commission will present draft legislation aimed at creating “one single and simple set of rules all over the Union”.
As the result, developers would be able “scale up across the member states much more easily than ever before”; the approach is actually emulated from the US internal market, where a startup in one state can easily move across all the US states.
= Third issue is the new technologies’ slow uptake by developers: it was precisely about three decades ago when the European community was far too slow to go digital and actively use the emerging internet and online facilities.
This drawback was the background for the European states loosing competitive edge in combating digital developers in e.g. the US, China and other countries. Presently, notes the Commission, “Europe has a stronger starting position: i.e. large companies are taking up AI achievements at the same pace as most of their competitors around the world”, though SMEs are still lagging behind, she added.
Therefore, the EU’s goal is to speed up the AI’s adoption across all socio-economic sectors; with this in mind, the Commission is going to present soon the EU-wide “Apply AI Strategy” based on a single but fundamental and basic “transformative principle: AI first”.
It means, that whenever a company or public office faces a new challenge, the first question must be” how can AI models help; i.e. because when AI is actively used, the developers are having better, faster, reliable and affordable solutions.
Besides, the Commission intends to create the EU-wide network of AI-powered advanced medical screening centres uniting top-class healthcare specialists in all European states, providing shorter waiting times for patients. These centers will incentivise hospitals and pharma companies to take up innovative AI solutions both to save lives and progress European wellbeing.